The Fortune Magazine has listed early bitcoin adopter Roger Ver 36th in the first-ever list of ‘Ledger 40 Under 40’, an honor roll of the most impressive, young blockchain and fintech leaders. Dubbed the “Bitcoin Jesus,” Ver believes that “Bitcoin is the most important invention in the history of the world since the Internet.”
Roger said in an interview with Naomi Brockwell that his love for bitcoin outweighed his love for Lamborghini, which he sold to invest in cryptocurrency. The next step for cryptocurrency according to the ‘Bitcoin Jesus’ is to gain greater mainstream adoption, so much so that it starves the central banks.
Biography
Born on January 27, 1979 in San Jose - and economic, political and cultural center of Silicon Valley, Roger Ver is now a citizen of St. Kitts and Nevis.
From 1997 to 1999 Ver studied astronomy, economics and mathematics at Deanza College. In 1998 he graduated from the Stanford University with a specialization in physics. While still at college, in 1999 Roger began his career by founding MemoryDealers.com - a world leader in the secondary market for Cisco related memory, transceivers and accessories.
In 2002, Ver pleaded guilty to illegally selling explosive firecrackers on eBay. He admitted to engaging in the business of selling explosives without a license from January 1999 through August 2000 and was sentenced to ten months in jail. While there, Roger started studying Japanese and subsequently moved to Japan in 2005 after serving the prison term. He renounced his US citizenship in 2014 after obtaining a St. Kitts and Nevis passport.
Writing in Voluntarist.com, Roger Ver said: “After my release from Lompoc Federal Penitentiary I had to deal with three years of lies, insults, threats, and general harassment by the U.S. Federal probation department. I moved to Japan on the very day my probation finished.”
In 2005 Roger founded Agilestar.com, which went on to become a world leader in optical transceivers used by fortune 100 companies around the world.
Ver & cryptocurrency
Roger first heard about bitcoin in 2011, when the price was still under $1 and became one of the earliest investors in the cryptocurrency. He has invested in a wide range of Bitcoin and blockchain-related businesses including ripple, Bitcoin.com, Blockchain.com, Bitpay.com, Kraken.com, Purse.io, and many more.
In 2011, Ver’s company Memorydealers became the first mainstream business in the world to start accepting Bitcoin for payments. Roger then went on to become the first person in the world to start investing in Bitcoin startups.
“If you care about liberty, the non-aggression principle, or economic freedom, in general, you should do everything you can to use bitcoin as often as possible in your daily life,” Roger says.
In 2012 he created Bitcoinstore.com - the first website offering half a million consumer electronics items for sale for bitcoin. In the same year, Roger co-founded Blockchain.info - the world’s most popular Bitcoin wallet. In 2014 he purchased the bitcoin.com domain name for an undisclosed sum and has been managing the domain himself since 2015.
Donations
Roger has donated over $1,000,000 to the Foundation for Economic Education. He has donated more than $100,000 to AntiWar.com - a source for antiwar news, viewpoint, and activities. On top of that Ver has donated more than $250,000 to anti-drug war causes. In 2012 Roger provided 10,000 bitcoins of funding for the Bitcoin Foundation.
Roger & politics
In the year 2000, Roger tried his hand in politics. He ran as a Libertarian candidate for the California State Assembly but lost. Roger based his campaign on issues like taxation, the war on drugs and the operations of the ATF.
“I vowed that if I were elected I would not accept any salary, considering the money would necessarily have been taken from others by force in the form of taxation. I also promised to cut as many taxes and repeal as many laws as I could,” Ver said two years later.
Roger and Bitcoin Cash
An early bitcoin pioneer, Roger Ver now says that bitcoin cash is ‘the real Bitcoin,’ and projects it to have a bigger market capitalization, trade volume and user base in the near future.
Ver urges everyone to start accepting and using bitcoin cash. “Bitcoin Cash is money for the world and it brings more economic freedom to every single individual in the world, and that makes the entire world a better place,” he said in a recent interview with CoinGeek.
“BCH is bitcoin in principle, game theory, economics, whitepaper definition, and all the things that made it successful to begin with. Today BTC is bitcoin in name only,” Roger Ver tweeted on June 10.
He also shared a video explaining his views on “why Bitcoin Cash is Bitcoin.”
Ver said in an interview with CNBC this May that “Bitcoin core software is slow, expensive and unreliable." The bitcoin cash, he said, is built specifically for transactions and can be used around the world as an actual currency.
Ver said new innovation and infrastructures are being built on top of bitcoin cash, "because it actually works." According to him, the economic path that BCH is actually the one that led to bitcoin's original success. Roger says he’s incredibly bullish on bitcoin cash for the “exact same reasons” he was bullish on bitcoin back in 2011.
Roger Ver Has been the subject of numerous books and documentaries. These include The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin (2014), The Bitcoin Gospel (2015), Bitcoin, The End of Money as We Know It (2015),Digital Gold (2016) and Magic Money (2017).