Hey
fible1
How is your investment in vanilacoin going? I am thinking about buying some vanilacoins and I wonder if you could provide me(us) with some feedback about the community and the coin in general. Is it something worth looking into?
Well, it's complicated. My investment is doing fine, I'm actually up quite a bit since I purchased, so I can't complain there. I do have issue with the dev being anonymous and it seems like he is the only one working on the coin, so that makes me quite uncomfortable.
Also, the VNL thread on Bitcointalk was recently shut down due to heavy trolling and some infighting, and nothing seems to have replaced it, as the official forums and the forums over at Bitcoin.com are pretty quiet. So it's hard to get new information.
The coin is POS, so if you can get 10k coins (around 400 bucks right now), you can stake. At current rates you should almost double your money in a year, but "superpeers" (as they are called) are rising so that is bound to go down.
I do think that there is legitimate innovation going on at Vanilla with Zerotime (instant TX), specialized mining algos and a great deal of other stuff that I'm not qualified to get into. My main complaint is that it is a one man show and should the dev quit or for some reason not be able to continue, the coin will die. But it is so cheap currently that I think its worth it to drop a few hundred bucks to 1k and wait and see what happens, its definitely not a shitcoin.
The community is nice, but like ours, they are a bit traumatized by trolls, so they may take a bit to warm up to you. There is something I noticed that is not unique to Vanilla (we do it too) and the best way to put it is "developer adoration". Not sure how that would fit into your analysis but it's something to consider.
Again, my main qualm with Vanilla is that it is a one man show, and the developer doesn't seem to be working to expand the team so there is a limit to how far one man can take a coin I think. Not sure if this will change in the future as he has made it quite clear the coin is experimental right now and he seems to like it this way. I am not qualified to review the code but if you are, you should be able to learn quite a bit by comparing release announcements to actual function.
Again, I am happy to have made my investment, but I would not drop my life savings in there quite yet. I am waiting to see the dev team grow and the coins expand past one developer to make a second investment.
I suggest you read the White Paper's and go from there, hit me up if you have any other questions.
Pablo.