I first met Roger Ver when I invited him to my Christmas party in Antigua in 2017. I sent a private plane to fetch him from the neighboring island of St. Kitts, where he lives part time.
I next met him in Japan in March 2018 when I went to a conference named Satoshi Vision with my friend Dr. Craig Wright. In Japan, Roger told me that he agreed that Craig was the person who had created Bitcoin under the name Satoshi Nakamoto.
Roger maintained this view right up until Craig refused to support Roger’s efforts to fork away from Bitcoin’s original protocol to the ABC technology that now trades under the BCH ticker symbol (which I refer to as Alphabet Soup).
The last time Roger and I met was in September 2018 at a miner’s meeting in Bangkok, where Roger had dinner with Craig, Jimmy Nguyen, Steve Shadders, myself and a few others. It was shortly after this meeting that Roger began pitching me on his new view that Craig was not Satoshi and that I should join him and the other Soupers on their poorly conceived plans to fork away from Bitcoin.
This was the point where we realized that Roger did not really support Bitcoin’s original design and was prepared to do anything to support his own version, including attacking Craig publicly by saying the exact opposite of what he’d told us all privately.
My refusal to follow ABC’s faulty plan marked the start of the world’s first hash war, which saw Bitmain nearly kill themselves in an unethical and likely illegal hash manipulation that ultimately allowed them to fork away from Bitcoin while keeping the Alphabet Soup ticker symbol and infrastructure.
Most of the ecosystem stayed with the original Bitcoin, which was now named Bitcoin SV (Satoshi Vision) and trades as BSV. The reason they stayed was that the developers understood that success depended on massive scaling and keeping the protocol stable. The BSV camp all got what we wanted, a continuation of the only Bitcoin blockchain that adheres to both the original protocol and economic model, and also scales massively on-chain.
Roger was recently sued in a UK court after he published videos and social media posts that libeled Dr. Wright. This case and others like it will firmly establish in law that Craig is Satoshi Nakamoto, as everyone – including Craig’s trolls – already knows, even if they won’t admit it publicly.
This is going to be massively embarrassing for Roger and others who cannot possibly win these cases. Lawyers have gone over the evidence and it all checks out: Craig is Satoshi and can prove it in court. The evidence is all out there in the public domain so anyone smart can independently make the correct determination on this.
In reality, this doesn’t even matter anymore, as Craig has already been proven right in the only arena that really matters: the technology. Craig has capably demonstrated that BSV does exactly what he said it could and as such the entire application development world is moving to it.
So I ask the question: Is Roger Ver a con man or a moron? I remain unsure of this myself but based on my own experience these are the only two options to consider.
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