Bitcoin Cash Is Something Worth Stealing — Roger Ver on $45-Million Hack

And he just got scared. He said, you can't say things like that. If I had had, you know, $45 million of cryptocurrency stolen from me, I'd be grasping at every straw that I possibly could to help me. Anybody, every mining pool, anyone. Cointelegraph helped me. BTC version of bitcoin. It just seems like a bunch of speculators speculating on the future speculation of other speculators. Already more physical shops around the world accepting bitcoin cash as payment than any other cryptocurrency. Because bitcoin cash's price will be higher than the BTC version of Bitcoin's price.

What's up, YouTube? My name is Jackson, and today I'm going to be joined of the more controversial figures in crypto. He used to be called bitcoin Jesus, but these days he's busy promoting bitcoin cash. This is the CEO of Bitcoin.com, roger Ver. How's it going today, Roger?

Thank you, Jackson. Honored to be with you guys. You guys have been one of the oldest and most reputable media pieces in the entire space. So nicely done.

In a series of interviews on Bitcoin.com's YouTube channel, you talk about how when you heard about bitcoin, you pretty much dropped everything in order to buy bitcoin. You even sold your Lamborghini to buy bitcoin.

When bitcoin came along, I thought, oh, I better sell my Lamborghini to buy more bitcoin. And that's exactly what I did. So I went the reverse direction.

Do you remember the exact moment when you realized just how big bitcoin was going to be?

I realized how important bitcoin was going to be right from the first time. I wrapped my head around exactly how it worked, and that was that you can send and receive any amount of money to buy and sell things with anyone, anywhere in the world instantly. And I literally got so excited about it. I spent every waking moment reading about it. I couldn't fall asleep. I stayed up all night, you know, multiple nights in a row. And after just going on this crazy binge of studying and learning everything I could about bitcoin, I actually got really, really, really sick due to lack of sleep. And I was so sick, I couldn't even drive myself to the doctor. So I called my friend and said, please, can you help take me to the hospital. And they took me to the hospital. This was in San Jose, California. And the doctor gave me some sort of a sedative or Something that I slept for maybe 18 hours straight or something like that, and then woke up again feeling a bit more refreshed. But right back to bitcoin. Every day, all day. And if you go and watch my early videos, too, you'll be able to see just how passionate I was about people being able to use bitcoin to buy and sell things with people all over the world. And that's the same thing I'm still so excited about today.

Awesome. So, for those of you who don't know, Roger actually spent about 10 months in jail in the US for selling firecrackers, correct?

Right. So I bought firecrackers on one website and then resold them on ebay to people all over the country. And if they had had bitcoin around at that time, I would have gladly accepted bitcoin for payment. But this was back in the where people actually had to send physical money orders in the mail for most of the orders on ebay. So they'd go to the post office, buy a money order, and then ship that in the mail. Because this was before PayPal, before Bitcoin, before much of any of that sort of stuff.

So in the YouTube series on Bitcoin.com, you talk about how your time in jail actually helped you to recognize the opportunity that bitcoin presented.

So these things that have utility and these other characteristics naturally become used as money within the prison, and people are buying and selling everything using these things as money. And so when bitcoin came along, I knew. I knew that people were going to start using it as money.

Could you just explain that connection a little bit more between bitcoin and your time in jail?

Sure. So before I went to prison, I had spent a lot of time studying economics books and particularly the origin of money, and how something comes to be used as money. And anything that, you know, winds up being used as money, it has to have, or anything that winds up being used as a store of value or money has to have some additional use case outside of just the use case of money. So if you look at it, you know, in prison, everybody was using tobacco as money because you could smoke it. They're using top ramen soups as money because you can eat it. They were using postage stamps as money because you can mail things with it. All of these things have these additional use cases outside of just being a store of value. So when I saw the prison economy and how people were buying and selling things and how things just naturally became used as money in prison, it validated what I had read about theoretically in the economics books as to what the origin of money was. So I knew from the economics books what theoretically the origin was supposed to be. But I knew practically from my experience in prison what the origin of money was. And it's something that has some additional use case. It has to be easy to store, easily recognizable, easily divisible, easily transportable, or in prison, in this case, easily smuggable. So all of these things led to those particular things being useful as good money. And when I heard about bitcoin for the first time, I knew that people were going to start using it as money to buy and sell things. There was absolutely no doubt in my mind. And because the supply was limited, I knew as more and more people started to use it as money, the price would go up over time. So the first step was to buy some bitcoin. The next step was to help build the infrastructure to make it even more usable for people to pay each other and buy and sell things over the Internet or in person.

That's really interesting. So what you're saying is that what you saw in the prison economy sort of confirmed what you were reading in the books at that time, Is that correct?

Yeah, a lot of people don't realize it, thankfully, because they've never been to prison. But in prison, there is just this massive internal prison economy where people are doing anything and everything to earn money and serve their fellow man. So everything from cooking for each other, doing each other's laundry, shining shoes, to, you know, even prostitution services, like anything and everything is going on there in prison for money. And people, you know, you don't have access to normal, you know, dollar bills or credit cards or PayPal or Bitcoin. So you have to improvise and use the next best thing for money. And in that case, the. The next best thing for money is things like tobacco or top ramen soups or potion stamps.

Yeah, it's. It's a barter system. Right.

I don't even know if you would really call it barter. So, like, there's specific exchange rates between top ramen soups and postage stamps and tobacco. And I can't remember exactly what the exchange rate is now, but like, occasionally, like, the commissary in the prison would be sold out of one of those items, and you would watch the exchange rate, you know, go up, and people would hoard the particular things and then sell them for more. So, like, it was really interesting watching prices rationed goods in the economy. Whereas if and if you study Economics, you know, anytime the government has, you know, price fixing, it leads to shortest shortages or surpluses. And in prison, when the market is clearly what's setting the prices within the prison economy, you watch the prices and just how amazing they are, transmitting information as to what goods people want and what people are willing to do for those goods. And it's really, really an amazing micro economy to be able to watch firsthand to see that all the things that you had studied and read about in these economics books are actually true in practice. So it was really a fantastic learning experience in that sense.

So I remember in an interview you did with us actually last year, you said that one of the nicknames you earned in prison was El Peligroso. What on earth were you selling in order to earn that nickname?

Yeah, so for those that don't speak Spanish too well, my nickname in prison wound up being El Pellegrosso, which means the dangerous one. But it was just more of a joke than anything because all I did every day in prison is once I figured out how things worked, I was able to pay somebody else to do my job within the prison. And I just stayed in my bed all day, every day reading books. And I hardly left my bunk bed at all. I just stayed in bed reading books all day, every day. So it was just a joke because I, at that point I probably weighed maybe 120 pounds or something like that. And I was just a 22 year old kid and I was as far from dangerous as you could get. So that was like the joke within prison was to call me El pellegrosa, the dangerous one.

You were selling knowledge then, huh?

Actually, I remember. Speaking of selling knowledge, I remember a specific instance. I made friends with a guy in there that was in there for, you know, a tax evasion or tax problem. He had been selling a whole bunch of phone cards and then didn't pay income tax on it. He was an immigrant to America, so he probably didn't even necessarily know exactly how everything worked. And I was telling him, I said, no, no, no, you served a bunch of customers who had a product that you wanted to buy. You sold them phone cards they wanted to buy. They paid you money they wanted to buy. It's the government that should be embarrassed for having sent you here. You were helping make the world a better place, and now they're making the world a worse place by sending you here. They're the ones that should be embarrassed for having sent you here. You' you're not the one who should be embarrassed for being here, you should hold your head up high and say that the guards and the prosecutors and the judges and the irs, those are the ones who should be ashamed for having sent you here. And he just got scared. He said, you can't say things like that. He didn't necessarily philosophically disagree. He was just scared to even have those ideas.

On Saturday, cointelegraph reported that an investor who is allegedly Josh Jones, the founder of bitcoin builder, lost $30 million worth of bitcoin bitcoin cash in a wallet hack. Dovey Wan, who is the founding partner of crypto asset fund Primitive Ventures, said that this will play a role in the, and I quote, slow death of bitcoin cash. What is your version of the events that led to this hack?

So I don't know Dovey Wan or much about her, and I didn't have a chance to follow the hack real closely. But I do recall it wasn't 30 million. I think it was $30 million of Bitcoin Cash and $15 million of Bitcoin Core BTC. And so that's a really interesting thing right there. Here's somebody that's worth at least $45 million, and he's choosing to keep the majority of that in bitcoin cash, not in what everybody's calling bitcoin today. And so that's a really, really bullish sign for bitcoin cash right there. That somebody with that much money is keeping it in, in bitcoin cash and not, not the same amount in bitcoin btc. That's a really, really big deal. And as far as what Dovey says, like, I don't know her and I don't know much about her, but what an ignorant statement. The fact that hackers are willing to go and steal bitcoin cash means that it's something worth stealing, it's something valuable. If it wasn't valuable and wasn't worthwhile, hackers wouldn't be busy trying to steal it. So I've heard the same sort of thing when, you know, there are problems with Mt. Gox and other exchanges being hacked. Hackers wouldn't be hacking these things if it wasn't valuable. So I don't know what sort of twisted logic she's using to come up with that this will lead to the slow death of bitcoin cash. Bitcoin cash right now, today is the second most used cryptocurrency in the entire world, behind only the BTC version of bitcoin. And I think that that's going to change in the future because Bitcoin cash provides a better user experience than BTC does. So as an investor, I'd be looking to Bitcoin cash. I think that's the smart investment. Bitcoin cash could potentially go up 500 or 1000 times from where it is today. I don't think BTC is ever going to go up. I don't even think it's going to go up 100 times from where it is today, even 10 times. I'd be really, really, really shocked.

That's a very optimistic sort of glass half full perspective. And I remember in the Reddit post the investor made about the hack, he called on the miners to help him do something with the blocks in order to reverse the transaction and possibly get his money back. Is there anything that you can do to help him with this hack?

I wish there was to some extent, but on the other side, that's the point, kind of the whole point of cryptocurrencies. The transactions are irreversible. And if I had had, you know, $45 million of cryptocurrency stolen from me, I'd be grasping at every straw that I possibly could to help me. Anybody, every mining pool, anyone. Cointelegraph help me. And I don't blame the guy one bit for asking. But the fact of the matter is there isn't really anything that anybody can do unless the hacker is dumb enough to just deposit the coins directly to an exchange without sending them through any sort of, you know, fungibility tool of any sort. Something like Coin Shuffle or Cash Fusion on Bitcoin Cash. There's a lot of cool tools on Bitcoin Cash to enable that, but in this instance, it's a little bit sad that those tools will be used to help a hacker.

Definitely an unfortunate loss for Josh Jones, if it was him. So, moving on. On January 22, a proposal was announced to funnel 12.5% of all Bitcoin cash mining rewards into a fund in Hong Kong. This fund would be used to support software development for Bitcoin Cash. This proposal was supported by the CEOs of BitcoinTop, Antpool and ViaBTC, as well as yourself. Together, the companies these CEOs represent control 27% of the mining power of Bitcoin Cash. On January 28th, Bitcoin.com made an announcement saying that until there was a negligible chance of a chain split, this proposal would not go through. Why did you initially support this proposal?

Yeah, I'm glad you asked me that question, because it Sounds like there's more clarification that needs to be done. So we never supported that proposal. The signature came out with our company name and my name on it, but it came out without my permission. And so we never, ever were actually a signer to that. It didn't come out because of malice. There have been internal discussions and there was definitely talk about it, but I never gave my consent to have my company name on that thing. And we've never actually been a supporter. I only supported people being able to talk about it, so we never changed our position. I still support people being able to talk about it. And that's one of the things that I love the most about the bitcoin cash community is there isn't any censorship on these platforms. People can go and talk about it and advocate it and even have the former CTO of Blockstream, Greg Maxwell, shows up on our BTC and comes and argues with us and he doesn't get banned. Whereas if anybody shows up in our bitcoin and advocates in favor of bitcoin cash, they'll instantly be banned and have their post deleted from there. So it's a really fantastic sign that the bitcoin cash community has such a strong commitment to freedom of speech and free minds and free markets and discussing and exploring new ideas and so. But to your question specifically, we never signed it and it was just a miscommunication that that came out with our name on it. And later we put a statement out saying that, hey, we didn't sign that, but we do support people being able to talk about it.

So. So it was just a typo then, because your name, your name is just right here.

A typo is a little bit too light. There's multiple time zones and, you know, Chinese speakers and English speakers, and there was lots of, you know, back and forth and. But it was definitely. I was stunned when it came out and had my name on it because we had not given permission for that at all. So that's where we're at. But I fully support people's right to discuss it.

Where do you think the motivation for this proposal came from? I mean, you were clearly involved in a discussion. So where do you think the driving motivation for this proposal came from?

I think there's some businesses that have been paying bitcoin ABC to do protocol development work, and they've been paying out of their pocket, and I think they would like to find a source other than their own pocket to help pay for that. And I think that's the motivation for it.

So this actually reminds me of a report from Electric Capital that was made in the summer of last year. It said that Bitcoin cash had lost 32% of its software developers from the previous six months. Why do you think so many software developers stopped working on Bitcoin Cash?

So I don't think that there was a decline in the number of software developers working on Bitcoin Cash. But there's so many different projects and different things happening in Bitcoin Cash that if they just measured that one specific repository, then maybe there was a decline. But there were a whole bunch of other software deposit repositories and things happening, like, you know, Cash Shuffle and, you know, the MIPS, Bitcoin.com and there's Bitcoin Unlimited guys and Bitcoin Verde and there's just a whole bunch of different projects all over the world busy building all sorts of different things. So the total number of developers working on Bitcoin Cash stuff is probably more today than ever before. So if there was a decline within one repository, that's what they were looking at. But if they look at the bigger picture, they would have seen that there's more stuff and more action happening on Bitcoin Cash than ever before.

So the report was inaccurate is what you're saying?

Sure. Great summary. The report was inaccurate if it said that there were fewer people working on Bitcoin Cash.

Great. So going back to my previous question, is this proposal of essentially taxing the miners something you would consider if it was at a lower percentage, or are you totally against this sort of fundraising?

So Bitcoin Cash, arguably, if you track it back to the original genesis block of bitcoin has been around for over a decade and there's never been anything like that. I would have to hear some really, really, really strong arguments by such a big, big, major change should be made to Bitcoin Cash. And I haven't heard any arguments that are even remotely strong enough to get me to think that those changes are worthwhile. But I try and keep an open mind to all sorts of different things and I'm happy to hear new arguments that might come forward. But at this point, I don't see any reason to change the way in which Bitcoin cash is funded. And if I look at what happened to the BTC version of bitcoin, I think the reason it went off the rails is that the developers had too much money. Right? There were 100 plus million dollars of external money from traditional banks and traditional finance companies came into BTC to fund protocol developers, and then they destroyed the entire project and made it so it was no longer usable in commerce as money. So from my point of view, that was the problem with bitcoin and why it went off the rails. And I don't want to see the same thing happen to bitcoin cash. And so for those reasons, I'm not really a fan of the miner. Tax isn't really the right word, but it's the most concise, simple word. So I'm not really a fan of the mining tax.

Got it. So, as I'm sure you know, bitcoin cash's price has just about doubled since the beginning of the year. This must be exciting for you.

Sure, I like it, but I rarely check the price. For me, the really important thing is the underlying utility, right? What can people actually use this for in their lives? To make their lives better and easier and more convenient. And then the price is just a side effect of that. So if you can make it super useful for people to buy things on Amazon at 20% off using Purse IO or making their own token and sending that around the world or doing who knows what else with it, that's a good thing. And then the side effect of that is that the price goes up.

So do you have any targets where you say, okay, if we get to here, then we'll see more mass adoption, or if we get to here, then we'll see less volatility? Or do you strictly see price as an effect of the utility and increased utility of bitcoin cash?

Well, there's also people speculating on the future utility. And from my point of view, today the BTC version of bitcoin, it just seems like a bunch of speculators speculating on the future speculation of other speculators. And that isn't a game that I want to play or get involved in. Whereas bitcoin cash, I think the speculators are speculating on the future usefulness of bitcoin cash in commerce for real people in the world to do real things. And there's already more physical shops around the world accepting bitcoin cash as payment than any other cryptocurrency. And I think that that's a really big sign of things to come. And I remember in 2011 when Bitcoin went from less than a dollar to $30 in the course of a month or two, and then over the next year or so, it dropped all the way down from $30 down to less than $2, right? So big, big, big job. More than 90% drop and some people are feeling discouraged. But no, I could see all the stuff that people were building and all the tools and all the infrastructure that was being created. And I knew that bitcoin was going to start being used by more people than ever before and that the price was going to go up because of that. And I see the exact same thing happening with bitcoin cash right now. There's so much infrastructure and so much activity. I Cash fusion is amazing. If people haven't looked into cash fusion yet, it's fantastic. It's going to make bitcoin cash just as private in the same ballpark of privacy level as something like a Monero or a Zcash. It's really, really a big deal. There's more than 10 million wallets have been created with the Bitcoin.com wallet now. That's a really, really big deal. Bitcoin.com has all of its money in resources focused on bitcoin cash. There's a $200 million bitcoin cash ecosystem fund that's starting to be deployed. And this is a really, really, really big deal. And in terms of adoption on btc, maybe it's because I don't follow the news so closely anymore, but man, every time I've had to use it in the last couple of years, it's a bad user experience. The fees are at least 10, 10 cents, if not a couple of dollars, and the transactions take forever to go through and they can be reversed. And you know, it's not me talking bad about bitcoin. It's me speaking the truth. Bitcoin cash has more usefulness in commerce than bitcoin. And I think the day will come when the price will reflect that, because bitcoin cash's price will be higher than the BTC version of bitcoin's price. I don't think that that's a wild thing to say. I think that that's the future. Because when bitcoin limited its block space, it limited its usefulness, its commerce, it's limited its censorship resistance, it limited its ability to be adopted by people around the world. It basically committed economic suicide or first mover advantage suicide. And for me, as one of the biggest holders of bitcoin in the entire world and the owner of Bitcoin.com, that's the reason I fought so hard in the scaling debate, because I wanted to see bitcoin be a success. And today the cryptocurrency and I hold dozens of cryptocurrencies. I'm not a bitcoin cash maximalist. I hold everything. The one I'm the most bullish about, though, is bitcoin cash. And I think that that's. That's an interesting sign that somebody that holds lots of different cryptocurrencies is most bullish about bitcoin cash. Whereas you have a bunch of bitcoin maximalists that only hold one single coin. They only hold bitcoin. Of course, they're the most bullish on bitcoin. They're trying to pump the only thing that they hold. Whereas with me, if basically any of the top 50 cryptocurrencies succe, I'll do just fine monetarily. And I'm already just fine monetarily. I'm here because I want to build the economic tools to bring more economic freedom to the entire world. That's what gets me up every day, you know, seven days a week to focus on this sort of stuff. So thank you for letting me rant on that topic.

No worries. So what do you think about this whole idea of bitcoin as a safe haven or bitcoin as a store value as opposed to bitcoin being used for its utility?

Yeah, it's silly. It's absolutely silly. Like I saw firsthand in prison, there's nothing that can ever be used as a store of value that doesn't have a secondary use case. It just plain doesn't exist in the entire world. I don't think anybody can think of an asset that's only use cases a store of value. It doesn't exist. Right. So like to think that bitcoin is going to be the only thing ever in the entire history of humankind that's only use case is a store of value and it doesn't have some other secondary use case. That's nonsense. The only reason bitcoin still has the value that it does is because some people are still managing to use it in commerce. But to think that it's only use case that it needs to have is to be used as a store of value and it doesn't need another one. Man, go pick up an economics book. Or if you want to learn the harder way, go spend some time in prison and study the prison economy.

All right, great. Thank you so much for coming on the show today, Roger. We really appreciate you coming over and taking the time to talk to us.

My pleasure. Thank you so much, Jackson. And people, if you like Cointelegraph's content, share it on your own social media. Subscribe to this channel, share their articles, read their articles. They've been around for a long time, and they put out great content and they put out the best animated cartoon images for all their articles of any news publication ever in the history of the world. So thank you, Cointelegraph, for that.

Thank you, everyone, for watching. My name is Jackson, and that was Roger Ver. And always, guys, remember to, like, subscribe and hodl.

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