Bitcoin pioneer and early investor Roger Ver, known to many in crypto as ‘Bitcoin Jesus,’ broke a six-month media silence on Tuesday to talk with political commentator Tucker Carlson about bitcoin, crypto privacy, and government corruption. The St. Kitts and Nevis national from America told Carlson his arrest wasn’t about tax fraud charges, but political persecution, noting of the Department of Justice: “They can get you if they want you.”
Early bitcoin startup investor and passionate freedom advocate Roger Ver, also known as “Bitcoin Jesus,” could face 109 years in prison if extradited from Spain to face trial in the U.S. As Ver noted in his recent interview with political commentator Tucker Carlson, that would probably mean dying in prison.
And for what? He feels the charges are politically motivated, having nothing to do with alleged tax fraud the state says Ver committed both before and after he was a U.S. citizen.
“More than a decade after I had already renounced my U.S. citizenship, and just a couple of weeks after I had published a book on the hijacking of bitcoin, how it no longer works as peer-to-peer cash for the world … right after my book gets published that exposes how people claiming to work for intelligence agencies hijacked bitcoin to do that … suddenly I get arrested and tossed in jail in Spain,” Ver told Carlson early in the video interview.
Ver renounced his U.S. citizenship in 2014, after an earlier run-in with the American justice system and the ATF (ostensibly for selling firecrackers online) landed him in prison for 10 months. Ver believes that this event was also politically motivated, after he made cutting criticism of the U.S. government while running for office in California in 2000.
In the interview Ver is on the verge of tears as he brings up the tragic murder of innocent Americans in Waco, Texas in 1993: “Even if the parents were religious nuts, the ATF and the FBI literally burnt to death everybody in their home there and then posed for photos on top of the corpses of little kids. That sort of thing is not okay,” Ver stated.
“In the debate with the republican and democratic candidates, I called the ATF a bunch of murderers that they are for having done that, and boy did they not like that,” Ver emphasized to Carlson. He then became the only person in the world to be prosecuted for selling the particular brand of firecracker he was shipping on Ebay, even though major retailers and others were also selling it.
BTC hijacked, Zano and Monero may sustain economic freedom
Roger’s new book, Hijacking Bitcoin: The Hidden History of BTC, details how the blocksize wars (disagreement on how and whether to scale BTC amongst developers and community members), potential infiltration by state intelligence agencies, and outright propaganda have rendered what is currently known as Bitcoin as an impotent, merely speculative asset.
This is in stark opposition to what Bitcoin’s creator Satoshi Nakamoto wanted, as the bitcoin whitepaper states it was designed to be a permissionless, electronic cash.
“And in the early days everybody knew bitcoin was supposed to be money for the world, bitcoin was supposed to be used for payments as peer-to-peer cash for the world, and that’s how people were using it,” Ver told Carlson, before explaining how advocates for small blocks began creating propaganda to sway opinion, the CIA took interest, and forums on Reddit and elsewhere were blatantly censored and shut down via DDoS attacks.
Throughout the exchange, Carlson repeatedly hammered home the idea that bitcoin is not private (almost as if there was an agenda to turn people away from crypto), and then asked Ver his thoughts on the matter, and whether Bitcoin can be made private. Interestingly Ver did not mention the CashFusion privacy protocol on Bitcoin Cash, which he views as the original and “real” bitcoin, but did bring up privacy coins and networks like Zano and Monero.
“It sounds like your ideological commitment is overriding your financial interests,” Carlson said at one point in the interview. Ver responded: “It’s not even close for me.” Ver described how certain protocols are much better for economic freedom than BTC held on centralized exchanges, which is worse privacy-wise than even a normal bank account.
“Luckily there’s other cryptocurrencies out there that do give people more privacy, so there’s things like Monero which most people are now using if they want some privacy … There’s another one called Zano that allows anybody to create their own privacy token in which nobody can see what’s going on,” Ver explained, continuing: “And if you really want to get the three-letter agencies upset, or governments upset, there’s a project called Confidential Layer, which is creating a bridge from Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Ethereum onto Zano.”
In Ver’s view, with people using money the state cannot control, permissionlessly, the government won’t be able to fund wars, or massacres like at Waco, nearly as easily. “It’s a wonderful thing when government loses the ability to control people’s lives,” Ver noted. And while Bitcoin Jesus did lament at one point that “they can get you if they want you” by cooking up bogus tax charges, the first bitcoin startup investor doesn’t seem to be backing down in the face of their violent threats.
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