Beluga Spotlight: Roger Ver

Introduction

On April 30, 2024 Roger Ver was arrested in Spain for tax evasion by the US Government. Only days prior to his arrest, Roger gave Beluga an exclusive interview discussing his controversial background in crypto and he answered every question we asked him. We have since reached out to Roger for an update and he wanted to thank everyone for their support, and will issue a statement himself at a later time.

About Roger

Roger Ver began his Bitcoin journey in February of 2011, and was the first person in the world to start actively investing in Bitcoin startups. Roger is also responsible for things like the world's first Bitcoin billboard, national radio ads, the first established business to accept Bitcoin as payment, the million dollar Bitcoin bet, and seed funding for such companies as Blockchain.com, Bitpay, Kraken, XRP, and many more. He is a voluntaryist and believes that voluntary human interactions in the free market can and should replace the violent interventions of governments.

Interview

You had a very interesting path getting into crypto. Can you please give some background on that?

I have been involved in e-commerce since the very earliest days of the Internet. I was always frustrated by people with stolen credit cards trying to buy products from my store. When I heard about Bitcoin I knew that this would solve the problem for online payments as it was so much easier than accepting credit cards. I knew without any doubt that people were going to start using Bitcoin for payments. My first step was to buy a bunch of Bitcoin and my second step was to start building the tools to make it easier for people to use it as currency.

A lot of people don’t realize you were the first investor into many of the largest crypto companies including Kraken, XRP, Blockchain, Shapeshift, BitPay, etc. You were essentially the first crypto VC. What made you want to invest your own personal money?

Back then there was nobody else to do it, but I knew that Bitcoin was going to change the entire world and I already had some money. So of course I had to start investing and had some big hits like Kraken, Blockchain.com, BitPay and Ripple. However, there were quite a few that didn't make it like Charlie Shrem’s BitInstant as well as many more failures.

You have the nickname “Bitcoin Jesus.” How did you get that name?

I didn't choose that name for myself. Other people just started calling me that because I was spreading the good word about Bitcoin to anybody and everybody I met. Whether it was a taxi driver or someone standing next to me in line at a restaurant I just kept talking about Bitcoin.

A lot of new people in crypto may not recognize your name, but before 2015 you were one of the most loved people in all of Bitcoin, and around 2015 you became one of the most controversial people in crypto. Can you explain what happened and how Bitcoin Cash was launched?

Sometime around 2015 or so, there was a civil war that was brewing within Bitcoin.

There were two basic philosophies or sides. One was the small block camp and one was the big block camp. At first I was actually more on the fence than any side. I wanted to listen to both arguments and decide which one made more sense for me. My heart was already leaning towards the big block side, but I wasn't sure. And like I said, I wanted to hear both sides' arguments. When I saw the small block side started doing everything they could to censor the big block side from being able to express their arguments and their positions, my mind was made up right then and there. Free speech is better than censorship. So of course I had to support the side that supported free speech and open discussion, which was the big block side. And even in hindsight, I think the big block side absolutely had the right path. Small blocks absolutely crippled, strangled and damaged Bitcoin's usefulness in commerce by limiting the block size on BTC. So when the Bitcoin civil war happened, my name became controversial but before that basically I was one of the major faces if not the major face of Bitcoin from 2011 until the civil war.

I wrote an entire book about exactly how Bitcoin, the entire Bitcoin project was hijacked and it's available at HijackingBitcoin.com.

One of the main use cases for Bitcoin Cash was payments. A lot of other blockchains have been created since that also focus on payments, but yet crypto payments still haven’t become mainstream. Why do you think that is and what needs to happen?

I think crypto payments would have become mainstream even faster had Bitcoin not been crippled. One of my favorite examples of that is Expedia.com.

Expedia started accepting Bitcoin back around 2014 and then in 2017 when the blocks became full and Bitcoin became slow, expensive and unreliable, Expedia stopped accepting Bitcoin, and until this very day, they have never accepted crypto again. Now there's Bitcoin Cash and other tokens and payment processors like BitPay and GoCrypto which make it easy for people to accept crypto. Bitcoin is not the payment crypto of choice because it doesn't really work that well for payments anymore. Had that not been the case, I think we would have seen even more adoption of crypto being used as payments around the world. We will still see widespread crypto use for payments some day, but life is short and we're years behind schedule from where we would have been otherwise.

You don’t hear much about the Bitcoin fights anymore. Is there still drama or tension, or has everyone moved on since the crypto industry has grown so much since then?

Is there still animosity? Yes, I think there's a huge amount of animosity from the people that got censored. Nobody likes to be censored, and a whole bunch of BTC maximalists did everything they could to censor the opinions of what was the majority of the Bitcoin ecosystem at that point. The big blockers were 90 plus percent of the ecosystem, but they got censored by a really loud, vocal, motivated minority, who were intent on strangling Bitcoin. Recently we have been seeing a lot of those people say, oh, maybe we were wrong, and small blocks weren't the right way to go. That is better late than never, but they're close to a decade late at this point.

Do you still own any Bitcoin or other cryptos?

I have plenty of Bitcoin, XRP, Bitcoin Cash, Monero, and ZCash, and then there’s my new up and coming sweetheart, a coin called Zano. It allows users to create their own tokens that have the same level of privacy as a Monero transaction, and the network is likely to be deflationary, so the price should really perform well too.

Where are the privacy tokens?

I think Zano's looking likely to be the privacy token platform, so I've been interested in that recently. We saw all the commerce for that sort of thing move from BTC with no privacy to things like Monero with privacy. And then later, Ethereum came along and everybody's doing tokens with no privacy. Well, where are the privacy tokens? I think the privacy tokens are going to be really, really popular, but there hasn't been any platform for that yet other than ZANO (zano.org) So that caught my attention. I think we'll see a big migration from tokens with no privacy to tokens with privacy.

In your wildest dreams, did you ever think crypto would become a Trillion dollar industry known around the world?

Yes, 100% for sure. That's why I was screaming from the rooftops about it back in 2011. You can go and even search on YouTube and find a Roger Ver Bitcoin bet and you'll find a video I made in 2011 predicting that Bitcoin was going to outperform gold, silver, US dollar, US stock market by more than 100 times in the next two years. Sure enough, it did, and even more so since then. From the time I made that video, it's up about 7,000 times. Those are pretty amazing numbers in just a decade. So the short answer is yes, I did think that was going to happen.

What are you working up to these days? I heard you're working on a new book.

Yeah, the book is called Hijacking Bitcoin and is available for sale right now at Hijacking Bitcoin for crypto, or any Amazon around the world.

I’m also looking into Ross Ulbricht’s story as it was just his 40th Birthday. I first heard about Bitcoin because of the Silk Road. Ross has been in jail for over 10 years now. He has a double life sentence for making basically the very first website that brought Bitcoin to the world. So I think that guy needs to be let out, I would love to see that happen. So I've been dabbling on that a little bit.

Do you have any price predictions for Bitcoin or Bitcoin Cash for 2024?

Well, the ETF certainly made a big difference for Bitcoin. I think the Bitcoin Cash ETF will be out there at some point in the not too distant future as well.

If you look at what's basically the precursor to the Bitcoin Cash ETF, which is the Grayscale BCHG product, it's already trading for more than $1,500 per Bitcoin Cash, whereas the spot price for Bitcoin Cash is around $500 at the moment. So I think there's a really good likelihood that we'll see a tripling of the price of Bitcoin Cash once the ETF for Bitcoin Cash gets approved. And when people like the Michael Saylors and the loudmouths of the world that aren't paying close attention realize that Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin are both equally scarce, but Bitcoin Cash has the added benefit of also working for payments, I think a lot more people will become interested in things like Bitcoin Cash at that point.

But there's thousands and thousands of cryptocurrencies out there in the world at this point. Which one's really going to get traction for payments and that sort of thing? I don't know. Maybe Bitcoin cash, maybe Litecoin, maybe something else. It is really hard to know.

Anything you're looking forward to in the crypto industry in the coming years?

I think just more adoption and the usefulness for payments. And I really hope that it doesn't become this tool to help governments financially oppress people. I want it to be a liberating technology that allows people to have more control over their own money.

There are a lot of stories about you, and it would be great to hear the truth from you: You went to jail for fireworks when you were younger, and you gave up your US citizenship and are not allowed back in the USA. Is that true?

Two out of three is not bad. So yes, I went to jail for selling fireworks. Well, kind of.

The actual crime was for selling fireworks without a license. If you get permission, then you're allowed to sell them, but if you don't have permission, then it's illegal. But the actual fact of the matter is that I ran for political office as a Libertarian, and they became very upset with the things I said politically. So even while I was in prison, the company that I had been buying the firecrackers from was selling the exact same product without a license all over the country. So I'm the only person ever to have been punished and gone to jail for selling those without a license.

It's absolutely true, I gave up my US citizenship. That was one of the best things I've ever done in my entire life. I'm so happy and proud of that. It's been more than a decade, but I am allowed back in the US. I have a 10-year multiple entry visa, so I can go to the US anytime I want at this point.

Have you sold your shares in your investments like Kraken, Ripple, BitPay, etc as they must be worth a lot of money?

They're worth a lot of money. I haven't sold much of any of them yet. I actually have a bit of a dispute with Ripple.

Jed McCaleb came up with the idea and then I put up the money for it. And then later, Chris Larson and everybody else came to Ripple. And then they diluted me out of 90% of my equity. So I'm actually in the process of suing them because they cheated me out of my equity stake. I was supposed to have 4.5% and they diluted me down to 0.45% and didn't inform me and I didn't notice until later. And so now I'm busy looking into how to sue Ripple because Chris and Brad Garlinghouse who came years after and both walked away with hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars each, while taking away 90% of my equity. Chris Larson got 10 billion XRP, so at the current price, that's still worth about $5 billion. It was really disappointing to see the way they treated me after I did so much for Ripple in the earliest days. I was literally the second person ever to be involved with Ripple.

Most people don’t know that you own Bitcoin.com? Can you explain how that happened?

I actually thought most people did know that I owned bitcoin.com. I paid a lot of Bitcoin for it early on. I tried loaning the domain name to or leasing it to the Chinese exchange OKCoin and then they cheated me by not making the payments. So I sued them, they forged signatures on documents, and there's a whole bunch of drama that went on around that in 2015. After OKCoin failed to keep up their half of the deal I decided to run bitcoin.com as a business myself. Did that for a number of years. I was the CEO, then found a new CEO more recently who's doing a great job. His name is Corbin Frazier. Check him out on YouTube, Twitter and everywhere else. And, yes I still own 100% of bitcoin.com.

Do you have any opinions on who Satoshi is?

I don't know and I don't think it matters. Whoever he is, he deserves his privacy because he made one of the most important things for the entire world.

Anything else you would like the public to know about you or clear up any misconceptions?

Yeah, I'd love to clear up the fact that I am not the creator of Bitcoin Cash. I had absolutely nothing to do with the creation of Bitcoin Cash. I love Bitcoin Cash because it works and it works incredibly well, but I had nothing to do with the creation of it, so I'm tired of people on the internet saying that I'm the creator of Bitcoin Cash. I’m here for the economic freedom being created for the world, and don’t have any specific loyalty to a specific chain based on its name or ticker symbol.