Roger Ver has said he is not the founder of Bitcoin cash (BCH) but only one of its promoters. “There’s plenty of lies about me on the internet, but probably the biggest lie is that I created Bitcoin cash. The truth of the matter is I had absolutely nothing to do with the creation of Bitcoin cash. I hardly even knew that it had been created at all,” he said in a recent podcast interview.
“To be honest, I had zero to do with the creation and I don’t even think I was even aware when the genesis block of the Bitcoin Cash split had happened. I found out a couple of weeks later,” he told the Pomp Podcast.
But Ver, an early promoter of Bitcoin, claimed he played a key role in the promotion of Bitcoin Cash, and that too, months after it came into being.
“I was keeping an eye on it on the side and then it wasn’t until the two megabyte part failed with the Segwit 2x agreement, which was months after BCH had already existed. That’s when I said well it doesn’t look like Bitcoin is going to scale to be money for the world with a one megabyte block size.
“The next best looking opportunity to bring more economic freedom to the world and all the wonderful things that enable it looks to me to be Bitcoin Cash. I focused my time and effort on Bitcoin cash, but I had zero to do with the creation of Bitcoin Cash,” he asserted.
On him being popularly called the Bitcoin Jesus, Ver said that he did not give himself the name as he’s an atheist.
“More and more people started calling me that but I never called myself, that I didn’t choose that name for myself. I am an atheist and if you look at what happened to the original Jesus, he was murdered by the government of his day. So things didn’t turn out too well for the original Jesus. I hope not to meet the same fate,” he said.
The tireless evangelist for Bitcoin also claimed that he had sleepless nights after coming to know about the cryptocurrency in early 2011, which enticed him to do more research on the same.
“I heard about it again and then I googled it again and that’s when I’ve figured out that there’s a limited supply, it’s a distributed network, nobody can shut it down, this is amazing and that’s when I literally got so excited about Bitcoin,” he said.
For someone who needs a full night of sleep daily, Ver said, he got lured by the concept when he first heard about the world’s first virtual currency that he chose to stay confined to his home to research on Bitcoin for weeks.
“When I read about it, I didn’t go to work. I stayed home all day reading about it, I stayed up all night that night reading about it into the next day until maybe 4 pm the next day, and then went to sleep for only maybe half an hour and woke up again and had to read more about it.
“I stayed up all night again the next night until maybe 10 am the next morning and then only went to sleep for you know maybe 45 minutes and that went on for about a week of me only sleeping about an hour a night.
And then after about a week of hardly sleeping at all didn’t leave my house once — that entire time only microwaved some food and just focused on reading everything I could find on the internet about Bitcoin, I got really really really sick from lack of sleep,” he said.
Asked if Australian computer scientist and businessman Craig Steven Wright is the real Satoshi, Ver quipped, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. If he were Satoshi he could provide that proof at any moment and he hasn’t done it yet.”
