I've always thought this is an excellent coin, one with integrity and ingenuity, at one point a few weeks ago I had 25k and seriously regret letting it go in drabs and drabs on the way up taking profit.
However, personally, I'm starting to lose the faith a bit. It seems a little too convenient that VNL is going through a period of rapid rise and continued ATH breaking right at the time there is ongoing testing with an "experimental" FPGA bitstream which is only available to the inner sanctum.
It's fair enough, the guys who put together the bitstream worked hard on it and should reap some reward for their effort but it's really frustrating to be sat on 5 idle FPGA's and missing the party. I think in the long run this will harm the coin, people will complain about the distribution during this phase which is in stark contrast to the early history of the coin and JC going out of his way to ensure fair distribution, and not without controversy.
2 people namely John and Cryptoflyr are building the software. They have all the right to release only a finished product, be happy they are releasing it unline most of the miner devs who only release a gimped product and only sell the finished ones. How can this make you lose faith?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that I believe it's wrong or unfair. I am saying it's frustrating. I want to support VNL, if I could I'd be happy to mine it, I want to acquire some, all day, every day. I don't want to sell it. But since I sold my GPU's a long time ago I can't mine it. The only way I can increase my holding is by trying to play the markets, buying low and selling high. The problem is there are people with a lot deeper pockets and it's a risky way to accumlate. Like I say, I'd much rather mine and much better something that's half as efficient as it could be than nothing at all.
Incidentally, I was able to generate a bitstream from cryptoflyr's source on github but try as I might I can't get it to work. I suspect I'm not doing it right since it's totally out of my sphere of technical expertise.