NAMED the Bitcoin Jesus, Roger Ver was one of the first entrepreneurs to make a big investment in Bitcoin way back in early 2011.
But what’s the story behind the founder of Bitcoin.com?
Who is Roger Ver?
Roger Ver was born in San Jose, California on January 27, 1979.
He went to school at Valley Christian High School and De Anza College but dropped out to pursue a career in business.
In 1999, Ver founded MemoryDealers.com which sold large amounts of computer hardware.
The company grew quickly and soon became one of the biggest websites offering transceivers, memory, and hardware.
However, in 2002, Ver was arrested for the illegal sale of explosives and spent 10 months in a federal prison.
When he was released, Ver continued with MemoryDealers, and in 2005 moved to Japan where he became a resident.
That same year, he founded Agilestar.com, which designed and sold optical transceivers across the globe.
In 2011, Ver said “Bitcoin is one of the most important inventions in the history of mankind” and MemoryDealers soon started accepting it as payment.
Since investing in Bitcoin in early 2011, Roger Ver has put millions of dollars into different startups in the cryptocurrency sphere.
Some of Ver’s biggest investments were in Bitcoin.com, Blockchain.com, Bitpay.com, Kraken.com and Purse.io.
By 2012, Ver had founded Bitcoinstore.com, which was one of the first online stores where you could buy anything using Bitcoin.
It has been estimated that Ver amassed more than 400,000 Bitcoins.
Ver’s biggest creation came in 2014 when he founded Bitcoin.com.
The company was founded in St. Kitts and Nevis, where Ver is a citizen after renouncing his US citizenship in 2014.
Ver served as CEO of Bitcoin.com until August 2019, when he transitioned to Executive Chairman.
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In 2017, Ver said that he was “really, really concerned about the future” of Bitcoin, claiming “the developers have destroyed” its use as money.
Ver pushed for an increase to the block size limit, a shift he believed would allow customers to pay for goods and services in Bitcoin while reducing fees.
But the majority of developers believed this could disrupt the decentralization of Bitcoin and negatively impact the transaction processing procedures.
Ver then aligned his opinions with a minority of cryptocurrency developers, including Craig Wright – who says he is Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto – when he spoke out in favor of a hard fork.
A hard fork is a protocol upgrade to a blockchain network that effectively creates a new network with a separate cryptocurrency.
In 2017, plans began to make a hard fork of Bitcoin.
This hard fork responded to the request to increase the size of the blocks.
Ver used all his influence to make the hard fork a reality and on August 1, 2017, Bitcoin split and Bitcoin Cash was born.
This project was quickly embraced by Ver and his website Bitcoin.com
However, Ver and Wright’s relationship quickly deteriorated and on November 15, 2018, Bitcoin Cash split again into, Bitcoin Cash ABC (BCH) supported by Ver and Bitcoin Cash SV (BSV) supported by Craig Wright.
What is Roger Ver’s net worth?
Roger Ver is estimated to be worth around $430 million.
In 2013, Ver donated more than $1 million worth of Bitcoin to the Foundation for Economic Education, a libertarian think tank.
In 2021, Ver donated an additional $2 million worth of Bitcoin Cash to the organization.