Hi @knircky Verge is not a scam, it was not premined, so no one got ripped off in an ICO
I do not recommend investing in Verge. It started as Dogecoin dark and the original developer did it as a hobby, it was rebranded into Verge and focuses on privacy.
Verge uses Proof of Work consenses, you can mine it with the following 5 algorithms: Scrypt, X17, Lyra2rev2, myr-groestl and blake2s. It probably isn't economical unless you have a lot of cheap electricity and powerful GPUs or you join a pool. The information is in their forum here https://vergecurrency.com/community/mining/

Verge is an open sourced project, see here https://github.com/vergecurrency they are funded through donations (not scammy) since it is a privacy coins it is very difficult to know who holds Verge. There will be 16.5B Verge and now there are 15B, a couple years ago there were 9B so they should be all mined in the next year or so.

Verge is not evenly distributed. Here are the stats https://verge-blockchain.info/richlist one wallet has 25%, the top 100 wallets have 96 percent.

Pornhub gave away a lot of Verge coin which doesn't help it's reputation.

I don't own any Verge and am not a fan of privacy coins. The lack of distribution is troublesome and there isn't a good way to reward Verge developers. I'd stay away from it not because it's a scam (it isn't) but because it is not a good investment.