At the risk of giving him exactly what he wants, I felt the need to put out my prediction of what the latest Roger Ver saga will eventually turn into. In April of this year, Roger Ver, one of the leaders behind the Bitcoin Cash hard fork, was arrested in Spain on charges that he didn’t pay enough exit taxes after renouncing his United States citizenship. The government alleges that he fraudulently undervalued the two businesses he owned in order to reduce his tax burden.
We covered our initial thoughts on Ver’s arrest in Episode 408 of our podcast. In a nutshell, while I don’t believe in the legitimacy of taxes and also that no one should face punishment for avoiding them, Ver’s career in the legitimate crimes of fraud and scamming makes me not very interested in providing him with any sort of help.
Ver had just released his book that he coauthored (a term that seems to need to be loosely used) with Steve Patterson called Hijacking Bitcoin. Ver and Patterson reopen the block size wars from years ago to again claim that the side that eventually forked to Bitcoin Cash was censored and that a small cabal in the Bitcoin community was infiltrated by the state to make sure Bitcoin is what it is today.
Maybe Roger is innocent of his accused tax crimes, but his unapologetic history of scamming and fraud gives me pause. I don’t know the details of his business or his tax burdens and payments. Ver and Patterson are talented manipulators: whether in regard to Ver’s legal issues or Bitcoin’s history, they will be very careful to present facts, but those facts are missing key context or other facts that would lead the listener to incorrect conclusions. Ver and Patterson describe his previous legal issues as getting arrested for selling firecrackers without a license. What they fail to mention is that he also violated his apartment lease by storing the fireworks in his apartment and mailing them to his customers without disclosing that he was shipping explosives. Mentioning those other pesky charges largely dirties his appeal to libertarian property rights ethics.
So excuse me while I hear his cries of victimhood and wonder if there’s more to the story that he’d rather us not hear, but that feeds into the bigger problem I see coming.
After writing a book, you’d expect the authors to set up speaking arrangements and guest appearances to talk about it. And now there’s much more to talk about than just the book now that Ver has been arrested. Ver needs to win a court case, so he’s appealing to anyone with libertarian leanings to throw their support behind him. On top of that, he’s appealing to anyone who thinks the rule of law is important since his argument for his innocence isn’t even necessarily that he shouldn’t have to pay taxes but that he did do everything legally required of him and that he is simply being persecuted. The idea is that even if you thought Ver was your enemy for what he did with Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, you still have an obligation to support him through this affront to justice that the state is carrying out against him. Despite everything in the past, you should still shout “Free Roger!” when given the opportunity.
Remember the Black Lives Matters (BLM) movement? What was so insidiously genius about their slogan is that if you said, “I’m against Black Lives Matter,” it gave people the opportunity to hit right back with, “Oh, so you don’t think that black lives matter?” Their goal was to demonize their opponents to make them look like hateful, racist jerks.
Fast forward to the 2024 presidential elections. The Libertarian Party intentionally ran their own ticket into the ground to ferry votes to Donald Trump. Part of their scheme involved getting Trump to promise to free Ross Ulbricht if he got elected (on day one even). While freeing Ross is obviously a worthy goal (and I pray that Trump does), it seemed to me as though freeing Ross was a means for the Libertarian Party and not the end. If someone wanted to disagree with their decision to let the presidential candidate for the Republican Party to speak at their national convention, they could attack him as someone who didn’t want to free Ross. Like the BLM, the Libertarian Party wanted to shame people into supporting them.
Why did I bring up the BLM and the Libertarian Party? Ver and his ilk are attempting to pull off the same bait and switch.
The timing of the book release and the arrest was fortuitous for Ver. He would of course already have claimed that he is the victim of government persecution, but now he’s able to provide a reason: his arguments in Hijacking Bitcoin were correct and his arrest means that he’s flying over the target. Out of one side of their mouths, Ver and Patterson will tell people, especially Bitcoiners, that they ought to support Ver because no one should have to be subjected to the unjust whims of the state, but out of the other side of their mouths, they will say that Ver is being targeted because his thesis about Bitcoin being hijacked is correct.
It’s the same emotional manipulation of the BLM and Libertarian Party. It’s an opportunity to make their opponents in Bitcoin look like heartless, pro-government stooges if they dare to not repeat the slogans of “Taxation is theft! Free Ross!” They’ll be able to say, “See? Look at how terrible these Bitcoiners are. They’re so caught up in their nonsense that they support the unjust enforcement of insane tax laws just because they’re programmed to hate Roger.” And then on the flip side, they’ll be able to say of the supporters of Ver’s release, “Oh, look at this. All of these Bitcoiners are admitting that Roger is being persecuted for shining a light on the truth about Bitcoin’s hijacking.”
Am I saying that Ver got arrested on purpose or something to advance his goals? No, that’d be quite a stretch, but in the words of Barack Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”
I also don’t want to suggest that a serial liar and con artist can never have a change of heart and subsequently lead a new life with an earnest attempt to be honest. But until a person like that shows remorse and attempts to change his ways from his past, you have to assume that you are once again the target of another scam.