The story of the Verus (https://github.com/veruscoin/VerusCoin) backdoor is fascinating and an example of how users of a cryptocurrency are at the complete whim of the developers of a coin. They must completely trust the developers and anybody who runs the infrastructure or makes binaries/etc. If there is an evil/shady person in that set of people, Very Bad Things Can Happen.
It might be that Mike wants to erase some of the evidence of this, but it's not easy for him, since the code cannot be deleted or the blockchain would not sync correctly. Just in case Mike/VRSC wants to make it harder to find this code or change where it is, I have archived the codebase here: https://git.hush.is/duke/VerusCoin . If any of the links in this document break, they can be viewed in the archived codebase.
## High Level Explanation
Here we will explain at a high level what motivated this backdoor and how it works, without delving into code. The lead developer Mike Toutonghi (https://github.com/miketout) mined large amounts of VRSC when it was first created. By some circumstances, he lost access to the wallet.dat file containing the funds. He did not want to relaunch the chain, as it causes a lot of work and confusion for users and mining pools/etc. So he decided to backdoor the code of VRSC, a "friendly" backdoor in his own mind, so he could reclaim his funds.
