Roger Ver | |
---|---|
Born | San Jose, California, U.S. | 27 January 1979
Nationality |
|
Occupation | Entrepreneur |
Known for | Promoting Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash |
Movement | Libertarianism, anarcho-capitalism, Voluntaryism |
Website | rogerver.com |
Roger Keith Ver (born 27 January 1979 [1] ) is an early investor in Bitcoin, Bitcoin-related startups and an early promoter of Bitcoin. [2] Ver has sometimes been referred to as "Bitcoin Jesus". [2] He now primarily promotes Bitcoin Cash as Ver sees it as fulfilling the intended and original purpose of the "Bitcoin White Paper", first published in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto, in which Nakamoto referred to Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. [3] [4]
Born and raised in Silicon Valley, he sold fireworks on eBay and later pleaded guilty to a related felony charge. [5] He served ten months in prison then moved to Japan in 2005. He renounced his United States citizenship in 2014 after obtaining a Saint Kitts and Nevis passport. He previously was CEO of Bitcoin.com. [6]
Ver was born in San Jose, California. He attended Valley Christian High School. He then attended De Anza College for one year, before dropping out to pursue his business interests. He identifies as a libertarian, anarcho-capitalist, voluntaryist, a peace advocate, and an advocate for individualism. [7] Ver attempted a run for California state assembly in the Libertarian party. During a debate in the run-up to this election, he claimed that the Drug Enforcement Agency was criminal in its practice. He moved to Japan in 2005, where he still maintains his residence as of 2021.
Ver renounced his United States citizenship in 2014 after he became a citizen of Saint Kitts and Nevis. [8] [9] In 2015, he was denied a visa to reenter the United States by the U.S. Embassy in Barbados, which claimed that he had not sufficiently proven ties outside of the United States that would motivate him to leave at the end of his visit, causing fears he might become an illegal immigrant. [10] [9] [11] Ver's name was published in the 2018 Q1 Quarterly Publication of Individuals Who Have Chosen to Expatriate. [12] In 2019, Ver was denied a visa to travel to Australia. [13]
According to an interview he gave in 2016, Ver describes Brazilian jiu-jitsu as one of his major passions in life. Ver can be seen in videos competing in BJJ world championships [14] and has achieved the rank of brown belt. [15]
In 2018, he was ranked number 36 in Fortune's "The Ledger 40 under 40" [16] for transforming business at the leading edge of finance and technology.
Ver was the CEO of MemoryDealers.com from 1999 until 2012. [17] In 2000, he attempted to enter politics by running for California State Assembly as a candidate for the Libertarian Party. [18]
In 2002, Ver pleaded guilty to selling explosive materials without a license, as well as illegally storing and mailing them. Ver sold at least 14 pounds of a brand called "Pest Control Report 2000" fireworks as large firecrackers on eBay, stored them in a residential apartment building, and mailed them to customers via the U.S. Postal Service. He was sentenced to 10 months in federal prison. [8] [10] [5] [19] The manufacturer was later forced to stop making and selling the product, which contained gunpowder far above the legal limit for consumer firecrackers. [20]
In 2018, Ver made a video that he posted to YouTube speaking on his experiences in federal prison. Ver labeled the video as, "My Story of Being Tortured in Prison". Ver claims in the video that he was arrested for "... selling firecrackers on eBay back when eBay had a 'guns and ammo' section, and it wasn't a big deal to do that at all."
Ver began investing in bitcoin in early 2011 when "...the price was still under one U.S. Dollar each" [7] . [2] The first investment he made was for Charlie Shrem’s Bitinstant. [21] Ver's investment allowed the company to hire a designer and another programmer. [22] He invested over a million dollars into new Bitcoin-related startups, including Ripple, Blockchain.com, BitPay, [23] and Kraken. [8] In 2011, Ver's company Memorydealers was the first to accept Bitcoin as payment. [24] He has been a prominent supporter of Bitcoin adoption and saw Bitcoin as a means to promote economic freedom.
In 2012, Ver was organizing Bitcoin meetups in Sunnyvale, California. [25] He is one of five founders of the Bitcoin Foundation. [26] Ver wants Bitcoin to rival major fiat currencies.
He is one of the main proponents of a larger block size for the Bitcoin blockchain. He supported the development of Bitcoin XT as a hard fork method towards an increase. Ver and his high school friend Jesse Powell attempted to re-establish the Mt Gox exchange during the June 2011 Bitcoin price crash. [25]
Ver was CEO of Bitcoin.com [27] until 1 August 2019, at which point he transitioned to executive chairman. Fortune Magazine in early 2020 mistakenly referred to Ver as the co-creator of Bitcoin Cash. [28]
As of June 2022, he is a shareholder in CoinFLEX, a centralized yield crypto exchange and is rumoured to be in a large amount of debt which is causing problems for the site. [29] [30] On 23 June 2022, CoinFlex paused withdrawals after a counterparty, which it later named as Ver, experienced liquidity issues and failed to repay a $47 million stablecoin margin call. [31]
Bitcoin is the first decentralized cryptocurrency. Nodes in the peer-to-peer bitcoin network verify transactions through cryptography and record them in a public distributed ledger, called a blockchain, without central oversight. Consensus between nodes is achieved using a computationally intensive process based on proof of work, called mining, that requires increasing quantities of electricity and guarantees the security of the bitcoin blockchain.
Satoshi Nakamoto is the name used by the presumed pseudonymous person or persons who developed Bitcoin, authored the Bitcoin white paper, and created and deployed Bitcoin's original reference implementation. As part of the implementation, Nakamoto also devised the first blockchain database. Nakamoto was active in the development of bitcoin until December 2010.
A cryptocurrency, crypto-currency, or crypto is a digital currency designed to work as a medium of exchange through a computer network that is not reliant on any central authority, such as a government or bank, to uphold or maintain it.
Charles Shrem IV is an American entrepreneur and bitcoin advocate. He co-founded the now-defunct startup company BitInstant, and is a founding member of the Bitcoin Foundation. In 2014 he was sentenced to two years in prison for aiding and abetting the operation of an unlicensed money-transmitting business related to the Silk Road marketplace. He was released from prison in 2016. In 2017, he joined Jaxx and served as its chief operating officer, and founded cryptocurrency advisory CryptoIQ.
Gavin Andresen is a software developer known for his involvement with bitcoin. He is based in Amherst, Massachusetts.
LocalBitcoins was a peer-to-peer bitcoin exchange platform based in Helsinki, Finland.
Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, a digital asset that uses cryptography to control its creation and management rather than relying on central authorities. Originally designed as a medium of exchange, Bitcoin is now primarily regarded as a store of value. The history of bitcoin started with its invention and implementation by Satoshi Nakamoto, who integrated many existing ideas from the cryptography community. Over the course of bitcoin's history, it has undergone rapid growth to become a significant store of value both on- and offline. From the mid-2010s, some businesses began accepting bitcoin in addition to traditional currencies.
Blockchain.com is a cryptocurrency financial services company. The company began as the first Bitcoin blockchain explorer in 2011 and later created a cryptocurrency wallet that accounted for 28% of bitcoin transactions between 2012 and 2020. It also operates a cryptocurrency exchange and provides institutional markets lending business and data, charts, and analytics.
Circle is a peer-to-peer payments technology company that now manages stablecoin USDC, a cryptocurrency the value of which is pegged to the U.S. dollar. It was founded by Jeremy Allaire and Sean Neville in October 2013. Circle is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. USDC, the second largest stablecoin worldwide, is designed to hold at or near a stable price of $1. The majority of its stablecoin collateral is held in short-term U.S. government securities.
Kraken is a United States–based cryptocurrency exchange, founded in 2011. It was one of the first bitcoin exchanges to be listed on Bloomberg Terminal and was valued at US$10.8 billion in mid-2022. The company has been the subject of several regulatory investigations since 2018, and has agreed to cumulative fines of over $30 million.
Craig Steven Wright is an Australian computer scientist and businessman. He has publicly claimed to be the main part of the team that created bitcoin, and the identity behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. These claims are generally regarded as false by the media and the cryptocurrency community. In March 2024, Mr Justice James Mellor in the British High Court ruled that Wright is not Nakamoto. As of 2019, Wright lives in the United Kingdom.
Gemini Trust Company, LLC (Gemini) is an American cryptocurrency exchange and custodian bank. It was founded in 2014 by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss.
Digital Currency Group (DCG) is a venture capital company focusing on the digital currency market. It is located in Stamford, Connecticut. The company has the subsidiaries Foundry, Genesis, Grayscale Investments, and Luno. It also formerly owned CoinDesk.
Bitfinex is a cryptocurrency exchange owned and operated by iFinex Inc, and is registered in the British Virgin Islands. Bitfinex was founded in 2012. It was originally a peer-to-peer Bitcoin exchange, and later added support for other cryptocurrencies.
Bitcoin was designed by its pseudonymous inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto, to work as a currency, but its status as a currency is disputed. Economists define money as a store of value, a medium of exchange and a unit of account, and agree that bitcoin does not currently meet all these criteria.
Bitcoin Cash is a cryptocurrency that is a fork of Bitcoin. Bitcoin Cash is a spin-off or altcoin that was created in 2017.
Jihan Wu is a Chinese billionaire cryptocurrency entrepreneur. Together with Micree Zhan, he co-founded Bitmain in 2013, which has become the world's largest computer chip company for bitcoin mining, with US$2.5 billion in revenue in 2017. He is a leading supporter of Bitcoin Cash, a hard fork of bitcoin created in 2017 with increased transaction capacity. He topped Forbes' 2020 World’s Billionaires List as one of the five youngest billionaires in Asia.
Tether is a cryptocurrency stablecoin, launched by the company Tether Limited Inc. in 2014. As of January 2024, Tether's website lists fourteen protocols and blockchains on which Tether has been minted.
Erik Tristan Voorhees is an American cryptocurrency entrepreneur and founder of the cryptocurrency exchange ShapeShift. He also co-founded Satoshi Dice and was the Director of Marketing at BitInstant. He has been referred to as a crypto-libertarian and has advocated for "the separation of money and state".