RE: The VeriCoin / Verium ICO (Phase One) sold out in the first 3 hours selling 350000 VRM for 2100000 VRC (worth around 350 btc)
Some basic differences as I understand it:
It should be most profitable to mine Verium and stake Vericoin.
If you don't want to mine Verium with your CPU (yes it should be CPU profitable) but still want to be an active node, you can hold Vericoin which will give you slightly better interest than the Vericoin inflation rate.
If you just want to hold and wait for value to rise..but don't want to mess with staking or mining, holding Verium is the answer as it has a future set supply of 2.7 million Verium.
Verium has slower block times and higher transaction fees and also is able to speed up Vericoin block times (through auxiliary mining of Vericoin blocks I think). Vericoin will go from 1 minute block times to as fast as 20 second block times.
So they work together.. the biggest reason I think for having both exist is that the world needs a currency which is fast (short block times) and has low fees and a low interest rate. You probably need some inflation to help ensure your lowest denomination is low enough to support micro transactions and very low transaction fees. Bitcoin will run into an issue there if it gets 10 to 100 fold bigger. The world (especially crypto world) also needs a commodity.. something which is fine having slower block times and higher fees..which will keep miners well fed (which makes for a strong and secure network), and will keep the holder properly protected against inflation.