By Evert Caldwell | Staff
The name Roger Ver will forever be synonymous with Bitcoin.
As one of the earliest investors in Bitcoin startups, Ver played a crucial role in promoting Bitcoin’s adoption, particularly among merchants and consumers. In 2011, his company, Memorydealers, became the first established business in the world to accept Bitcoin as a form of payment.
On his website, rogerver.com, a message reads, “Bitcoin is one of the most important inventions in all of human history. For the first time ever, everyone can send or receive any amount of money with anyone else, anywhere on the planet, conveniently and without restriction. It’s the dawn of a better, more free world.”
It’s hard to imagine anyone being opposed to something so convenient and liberating, but if you look into the latest news about Ver, you’ll quickly realize that not everyone is on board.
In fact, he claims, some who disagree would like to see him spend the rest of his life in prison.
Born on January 27, 1979, in San Jose, California, Ver developed an interest in technology at a young age, eventually earning a degree in economics from Santa Clara University. In 2011, he discovered Bitcoin, quickly recognizing its potential to revolutionize the financial landscape.
In an interview on the crypto talk YouTube channel “Show Me The Crypto,” Ver explained how, after hearing about Bitcoin, he recognized it could solve the e-commerce problems he was experiencing at Memorydealers, where customers would attempt to purchase his products online using stolen credit cards.
It was also around this time that Ver realized there needed to be a way to conduct peer-to-peer transactions on a device you hold yourself ~ without a custodian.
This epiphany was the result of witnessing one of the first instances where the government seized funds from a “digital currency.”
“There was this company called E-gold,” he explained, “and it was a really neat idea. You would pay each other in gold. The company would physically hold the gold in their vaults, and you would just transfer ownership of the gold electronically.”
As Ver recollected, there were millions of customers using the website, conducting peer-to-peer transactions at minimal cost, when the government came in and basically “stole everyone’s money” because some people were using it in conjunction with unlawful activities.
According to news reports, a U.S. federal grand jury indicted E-gold in 2007, accusing it of “money laundering, conspiracy, and operating an unlicensed money transmitting business.”
The official indictment described E-gold as a ‘digital currency’ acting as a ‘medium of exchange‘ offered over the Internet—similar to the ‘cryptocurrency’ market today, absent the blockchain technology.
The reason the Justice Department gave for shutting E-gold down was that “it knew its service was being abused by identity thieves and child pornographers but did not do enough to stop them.”
A more cynical analysis is that the government viewed E-gold as a threat to the financial system and used unlawful acts by a few bad actors—who also conduct transactions at banks and nearly every other method of exchange—to justify wiping out the accounts of law-abiding citizens… and send a message.
Ver noted that those in charge of returning funds to anyone on the site not charged with illegal activity made it very difficult for any of them to get their money back.
“I’d be surprised if 1% of people got their money back.”
When advocating for Bitcoin, Ver has consistently championed the principles of decentralization and financial freedom. This commitment led him to found Bitcoin.com, a platform aimed at educating individuals about Bitcoin and facilitating its use.
His advocacy also sparked controversy, particularly regarding his support for Bitcoin Cash, a fork of Bitcoin that emerged in 2017 after he and others lost faith in the direction Bitcoin’s core group of developers was taking the project.
The latest management team rebranded Bitcoin as a “medium of exchange,” a stark contrast to the “store of value” and “peer-to-peer cash for the world” that its creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, intended it to be.
In his book “Hijacking Bitcoin,” co-authored with Steve Patterson, Ver lays out the case supporting his belief that not only has Bitcoin been “hijacked,” but that the U.S. government had a hand in its bizarre pivot from decentralization.
Read the rest of the article in the Fall Recap issue of Rounder Magazine, available for purchase on rounderlife.com.
