WBD016 Audio Transcription

Roger Ver on Why Bitcoin Cash is the Real Bitcoin

Interview date: Friday 11th May

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Roger Ver. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.

In this interview, I talk to one of the most controversial people within the crypto community about his fork of Bitcoin, the use of the Bitcoin.com domain and his answers about honouring the original Satoshi whitepaper.

“If you are in this and involved because you want to see more economic freedom for the world, Bitcoin Cash is a better tool to achieve that than Bitcoin Core.”

— Roger Ver

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Hi Roger, thanks for having me here in Tokyo.

Roger Ver: Thank you for coming to Tokyo.

Peter McCormack: This is my first visit.

Roger Ver: Welcome.

Peter McCormack: You've been here since 2006, right?

Roger Ver: Yeah, that's right; a long time, 12 years.

Peter McCormack: What is it that attracted you to the place and why have you stayed here?

Roger Ver: It's a great place from the people, great food, wonderful.  What's not to like?  You've only been here for a day or so, but what's your impression so far?  Friendly, safe, clean, nice, right?

Peter McCormack: Everyone is so friendly, everything's clean, everything's nice.  Not great for a vegetarian, that's probably my only difficulty so far is the food.  I'm at the hotel.

Roger Ver: Actually, I think there's lots of great vegetarian food in Japan.  I think you just need to up your Japanese language skills to appreciate it.

Peter McCormack: Thank you for having me here.  Great to meet you finally.  I've got a lot of questions for you; I've got a lot of notes as well.  It's really interesting trying to research this, because there is so much.  I put a list of everything that I had; there was history, block size, scaling, whitepapers, economic censorship, mining, empty mining blocks; there's so much and I think all these interviews have already been done with you.  In my show notes, I'm going to put in the interviews with Richard Heart, with Samson Mow at Deconomy; people can see those. 

I think I want to approach things slightly differently and try and understand a bit more about how things are going with the Bitcoin Cash project, but also I want to understand a bit more about your motivations personally.  So, as somebody who got into Bitcoin seriously about a year and a half ago, I read Digital Gold and I read about this guy, Roger Ver.  He seemed like a really cool guy, seen some of your videos and then all this shit's happened since.  Can you give us an update on how the Bitcoin Cash project is going and then I'll ask you some more things?

Roger Ver: The Bitcoin Cash project's going amazingly well.  Actually, I woke up this morning to check the latest news and there's a text messaging app called eChat, I believe, with 33 million users that's building in Bitcoin Cash right there.  So, once that's live, I think pretty clearly Bitcoin Cash will have more potential users with the app installed than Bitcoin Core at that point.  So, Bitcoin Cash is having positive adoption around the world and growing numbers of transactions and growing numbers of exchanges and growing everything. 

Whereas, Bitcoin Core is sadly having negative merchant adoption where businesses that used to accept Bitcoin Core have stopped accepting Bitcoin Core.  That's happening with not just one or two business but lots of business; and not just small businesses, but great big giant businesses that used to accept Bitcoin Core have stopped doing so.

Peter McCormack: Where are your motivations driven from on this in terms of what you're trying to achieve with Bitcoin Cash?  Sometimes I see things which seem to come from your libertarian background, but then I also see things which come from you're a successful business person.  Where are you motivated?

Roger Ver: All of my motivations for this come from my libertarian, voluntarist self-ownership background where I think each individual should have 100% complete control over their own life and their own money and their own destiny.  Bitcoin Cash, I think, is the best tool the world has to enable that at the moment.  I wish the Bitcoin Core supporters good luck with their project, but I don't think it's the best tool the world has to achieve more personal liberty and personal economic freedom and more economic freedom for the world.  I think Bitcoin Cash is the best tool the world has to achieve those goals at this point, but if it's something else, I would gladly get behind that other project as well.

Peter McCormack: There's obviously been one hell of a scaling debate and argument for the last two years.  You've obviously been attacked a lot for your opinions.  Does it all get a bit tiring?

Roger Ver: No, it doesn't get tiring, because how often does a tool come along in the form of cryptocurrencies especially; but how often does a tool like that come along that has the ability to change the entire world for the better, and not just for one or two people in First World countries, but for literally every single person on the planet?  So no, I don't get tired of that.

Peter McCormack: You're happy to keep having the argument, having the fights, the conflicts.  Does this not detract away from the work you want to do on Bitcoin Cash?

Roger Ver: I think the fights and arguments are done and over at this point.  All the people are busy building tools and infrastructure on top of Bitcoin Cash, and the Bitcoin Core people are busy arguing, "Oh, you're stealing our brand", but go and read the whitepaper; it's very clear the whitepaper's describing Bitcoin Cash, it's not describing Bitcoin Core.

Peter McCormack: But it feels like in every question I ask you, you're promoting Bitcoin Cash, but you can't do it without a negative slant on Bitcoin Core.  Therefore, it feels like you are still in the debate and I wonder to myself, what is the end goal here?  Do you want Bitcoin to burn to the ground and die off; or do you not see actually this is a live split test about two approaches to scaling?  We're yet to see evidence, full evidence, long term; we've got historic evidence, but future evidence of which one will be right.

Roger Ver: I think all of the historical evidence shows that Bitcoin Core's path is the wrong one.  As soon as the blocks became full, it started losing market adoption, it started losing market share, it started losing all the characteristics that made it useful to the world as money.  Bitcoin Cash still has all those characteristics and that's why we're seeing so many people jump ship from being involved in Bitcoin Core to Bitcoin Cash. 

So, it's not that I'm attacking Bitcoin Core; I'm just trying to point out to the entire world that Bitcoin Cash is better money than Bitcoin Core, and Bitcoin Cash is a better chance of providing more economic freedom for the world than Bitcoin Core.  So, if you're in this and involved because you want to see more economic freedom for the world, Bitcoin Cash is a better tool to achieve that than Bitcoin Core.  That's not to say that I'm attacking Bitcoin Core; it's just like saying water is a healthier drink than Coca-Cola.  That's not attacking Coca-Cola; it's just a factual statement that Bitcoin Cash is better money than Bitcoin Core.

Peter McCormack: At present, it is better in terms of speed and cost, especially back when fees were $30 in December; I've heard you talk about that.

Roger Ver: The average fee at one point was over $50, and if you were running any sort of business you were regularly over $1,000 in fees for a single Bitcoin transaction.

Peter McCormack: We talked about this before we started.  I didn't see any harm in a short-term increase in the block size to keep fees down, because that would have been useful, especially for any retailers who had adopted it; it felt like a backward step.  At the same time, ten years down the line, we don't know what size blocks will be needed in ten years' time, we don't know if large blocks will be the most efficient path or we don't known if sidechains will be; it could be either.

Roger Ver: So, I agree that we don't know.  We have two options to figure out what the correct block size is.  One option is to have a small group of people decide, "Here's what the block size is going to be because we said so" or the Bitcoin Cash option is to let the market decide what the appropriate amount of block size to be produced is.  For anybody that's studied economics, you realise that the market is going to provide a more efficient outcome than a bunch of central planners deciding 1 megabyte is the be-all size when it comes to block size.

Peter McCormack: Bitcoin is not going to go away and Bitcoin Cash is not going to go away.  I've listened to all of the arguments, I've listened to both sides, and it feels to me like the route for somebody who doesn't have the experience and one thing that's very tricky for new people coming into Bitcoin is that they're encouraged to learn and understand the tech and get behind it.

Roger Ver: I fully encourage that.

Peter McCormack: Great.

Roger Ver: Use all the different cryptocurrencies and see which ones work the best for you.

Peter McCormack: But they're encouraged to understand and at the moment we're not all Jimmy Song, we're not all Jameson Lopp, we're not all Roger Ver, we've not all been here for years, we're not all techies, we're not all developers.  Yet people, leaders in the space talk about wanting millions of people to use it, so we're encouraged to understand.  It's very difficult for a new person to come in to understand the difference between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash.  You can go on Reddit, you can go onto r/btc and give an opposing argument and be called a fucking idiot, and you can have exactly the same on r/Bitcoin, so it becomes very difficult.

Roger Ver: What happens if you make an opposing argument on r/Bitcoin?

Peter McCormack: It can be deleted.  I'm not going to get into the censorship argument, because there's no point having a counterargument on either one.

Roger Ver: Not only can it be deleted; it will be deleted on r/Bitcoin if you propose something positive about Bitcoin Cash.

Peter McCormack: I think that deviates from the point, because on one it may get deleted, one it will get downvoted.  But on either side, you just get called a fucking idiot and you still haven't got anywhere closer to the truth.  Actually, you're probably better off going to something like r/CryptoCurrency or r/CryptoMarkets and asking a question and trying to get as best an impartial view as possible.  It's hard to find an impartial view, it's hard to find somebody to help you understand, and therefore I am wondering to what end and what benefit are all these arguments and fights, who's helping who here?

Roger Ver: I think a real big argument that still should be made is that free and open discussion of these ideas are incredibly important, and a huge swathe of the Bitcoin Core-supporting community are openly hostile to the ideas of free speech.  If Bitcoin is supposed to be censorship-resistant money, you shouldn't be engaging in a bunch of censorship online to further those ends.

Peter McCormack: Are we talking about r/Bitcoin Theymos?

Roger Ver: We're talking about r/Bitcoin Theymos.

Peter McCormack: For anyone who doesn't understand the background to Theymos, because I don't, what is the background here?

Roger Ver: So, for anybody that doesn't understand the background, I think a really great place to start will be go on Google and google "Bitcoin censorship" and there's at least two, maybe three articles by John Blocke.

Peter McCormack: Are they the ones on Medium?

Roger Ver: They're on Medium.

Peter McCormack: I'll share them.

Roger Ver: They outline the censorship that's been going on in the Bitcoin ecosystem there.  It's jaw-dropping; it's not just like deleting posts but they literally selectively delete posts.  Let's say there's the first post and the first post says, "I think such and such" and the second post says, "You're wrong because of whatever reasons" and then the third post, replying to the second says, "I agree".  And then they'll delete the middle post and leave the post saying, "I agree" so it looks like he's agreeing to the exact opposite of what he's actually agreeing to.  It's been caught red-handed going on, on r/Bitcoin and it's just absolutely disgusting if you think Bitcoin should be censorship-resistant money.

Peter McCormack: Of course, but Reddit is a toxic place anyway.

Roger Ver: I think censorship makes it toxic.

Peter McCormack: I think Twitter's a much better place to go and have debates.  I think it's much more open-minded.  I think as most people tend to use their proper name and photos, there's a bit more integrity around it.  I don't use Reddit anymore; I just got fed up of the pointless arguments and the back and forth.  What I used to do occasionally, I would create a post and I would put it on r/btc and on r/Bitcoin and just see the different reactions, and I've been called a fucking idiot on both of them so many times, I just gave up.  I just don't see any healthy debate there.

Also, whilst you claim they're censorship and I wouldn't argue against it, I don't think you struggle to get your voice across, because the flip side to --

Roger Ver: If I could interject there, I don't have any problem getting my voice across at all but I'm the CEO of Bitcoin.com and the world's first investor in Bitcoin start-up, so of course I'm able to get my voice across; but what about the other thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of other people who want to be able to participate on r/Bitcoin who aren't the CEO of Bitcoin.com and just had their posts deleted and had their accounts banned?  Those people are not able to have their voice heard because of the censorship.

Peter McCormack: For me though, do you know what it is?  I can think of two examples.  So, if you go to a soccer match in England, and I hate calling it soccer, but you go to a soccer match in England we're in opposing ends, the fans.  Say you've got Tottenham against Arsenal.  You put a Tottenham fan in the Arsenal end saying how great Tottenham are, they're all going to call him a fucking idiot.  That's the problem. 

I think with r/btc and r/Bitcoin, most people in there have made up their mind.  Although the censorship exists, I don't think it's to the detriment of people finding out information; I think all the information's out there.  I would say on the flip side, the Bitcoin Cash community has the advantage of using the Bitcoin.com domain and @bitcoin on Twitter to push their own argument forward, which isn't always impartial.

Roger Ver: I'd like to talk a little bit about the @bitcoin Twitter account.  A lot of people speculated that I bought it, that it's me; none of that's true.  But I do know who the owner of that account is; it's someone that's been involved in Bitcoin since 2009 and supports Bitcoin Cash.

Peter McCormack: It's Satoshi.

Roger Ver: It's not Satoshi, but it's somebody that's been around Bitcoin for a while, people would recognise his name.  He saw the way I've been viciously attacked for simply saying that Bitcoin should continue to be Bitcoin and that the Bitcoin Cash version of Bitcoin has continued to be Bitcoin, and the Bitcoin Core version is now something else.  He watched the way that I'd been attacked for saying something that I should be allowed to say, and he doesn't want any part of that with his product name associated with it.  But Bitcoin Cash, as I made in my other recent video, Bitcoin Cash has more Bitcoin-ness about it than Bitcoin Core does at this point.

Peter McCormack: People could easily say that's from your opinion and that's from the argument you've created.  I could create a spreadsheet to say why I think Bitcoin is better than Bitcoin Cash and create my rules for the spreadsheet.

Roger Ver: I would love to see some people make a spreadsheet as to why they think that Bitcoin Core has more Bitcoin-ness about it than Bitcoin Cash.  If somebody like Jimmy Song or Jameson Lopp or Adam Back or even Samson Mow, I'd be more than happy to have a nice, civil discussion about it with them as well.  I think it would be very interesting for both sides of this debate, and again, I'm not trying to attack Bitcoin Core; I wish them good luck. 

But I think objectively, Bitcoin Core doesn't have as much Bitcoin-ness about it as Bitcoin Cash and I think objectively, Bitcoin Core's not as good a form of money as Bitcoin Cash.  That's not an attack on Bitcoin Core; it's just an objective fact, just like gold is better money than a hunk of iron somewhere.

Peter McCormack: Okay.  I don't disagree but right now, on certain measures, you could argue Bitcoin Cash is better than Bitcoin as a form of cash.  Is it a better technology to scale long term?  I don't know; we could get into that.  But in fairness, would you not admit that you attacked Bitcoin?

Roger Ver: Can you give me an example of an attack?

Peter McCormack: Anything which you tweet out to try and discredit it is an attack.

Roger Ver: Can you give me one example?  I guess from my point of view, I don't see them as attacks, I see them as objective statements that Bitcoin Core doesn't work as well as money as Bitcoin Cash.  The fees are higher on Bitcoin Core, the transactions are slower.  Lightning Network doesn't exist yet in a certain usable way for commerce.  I don't see these as attacks any more than saying a golden life vest doesn't work as well as a life vest made out of Styrofoam.  It's not an attack on gold, it's just talking about the differences.

Peter McCormack: I guess equally, people could come back and say Bitcoin Cash is more centralised or Bitcoin Cash is about to have patents on it by Craig Wright, which is not really great for everyone; there's always a vector which you can pick to attack.  It does feel like, from where I'm coming from, that there is a bitterness towards Bitcoin.

Roger Ver: There's a lot of bitterness, but I think the reason the bitterness exists is because there's a Bitcoin that was outlined in the whitepaper and that Bitcoin name has been usurped by the Bitcoin Core supporters at this point for a system that doesn't even remotely resemble the Bitcoin that was described in the original Bitcoin whitepaper.

Peter McCormack: That's a bitterness you feel?

Roger Ver: Of course, yeah.

Peter McCormack: I think that bitterness comes across.

Roger Ver: I think I have good reason to be bitter on that front.  People used a bunch of censorship and propaganda and lies to divert the entire Bitcoin project into something that wasn't described in the original Bitcoin whitepaper.  Then they claimed the Bitcoin Cash project, that's still very similar to the original Bitcoin described in the original Bitcoin whitepaper, they had the audacity to claim that we're trying to steal the Bitcoin brand, when in fact it's the exact opposite.

Peter McCormack: The brand thing's an interesting point, because when did you start calling it Bitcoin Core?

Roger Ver: After the fork happened.  There used to be one and one Bitcoin only and then from 1 August, that single Bitcoin, BTC, split into two versions of Bitcoin: Bitcoin Core, that managed to retain the ticker symbol BTC; and Bitcoin Cash, that has the ticker symbol BCH. 

Peter McCormack: You were calling it Bitcoin SegWit at first.

Roger Ver: I think some other people were; I don't know if I did.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, you did.  I watched a bunch of videos last night.

Roger Ver: Then perhaps I have.

Peter McCormack: What I think is that is a conscious decision.  I'm not having a go at you, but from an outsider --

Roger Ver: You're welcome to have a go at me; it won't be the first time!

Peter McCormack: Everyone's done that.  I've watched John Carvalho and his interview with you, and I think you both probably regret parts of that, but he was trying to wind you up.  People are going to attack me after this and say, "Why didn't you have a go at Roger?"  I don't need to, but what I will do is stand by things that I firmly believe.

I think there's a hypocrisy in calling it Bitcoin Core when you get upset and people call Bitcoin Cash Bcash, which I'm using in my statement but I'm not going to refer to it as that.

Roger Ver: Just so people know, that's not what got me riled up with John Carvalho.

Peter McCormack: No, it was the sockpuppet.

Roger Ver: That was it.

Peter McCormack: But also you do get upset with people calling it Bcash.

Roger Ver: Of course I don't like it, and the reason they're doing that actually, so there's another fantastic article if anybody goes and googles, "Why do people call Bitcoin Cash Bcash?" there's another article I think on Medium as well.  There was a whole social media manipulation campaign where a bunch of Bitcoin Core supporters went and registered r/Bcash on Reddit and some Bcash domain names and this and that, and tried to divert everybody into calling Bitcoin Cash Bcash, because it strips away the Bitcoin name of Bitcoin Cash.

So, if we go out on the street here in front of the office here in Tokyo and ask people on the street, "Hey have you heard of Bitcoin?" they'll say of course.  If you ask them, "Have you heard of Bcash?" they'll say, "No, I've never heard of that".  It was an intentional attempt by Bitcoin Core supporters to make sure that Bitcoin Cash wasn't able to have any of the Bitcoin branding associated with it after the split and basically undo all the work and effort that so many Bitcoin Cash supporters did from 2009 until the split, promoting Bitcoin in general. 

Bitcoin Core managed to take most of that public goodwill with it by retaining the BTC ticker symbol, and so now we're having to play catch-up on that front.  So, it's definitely an intentional effort on my part to call Bitcoin Core Bitcoin Core and call Bitcoin Cash Bitcoin Cash, because I don't think that it's fair for Bitcoin Core to be the only version of Bitcoin with Bitcoin in the name.

Peter McCormack: Okay, there's a couple of points on that.  Firstly, it's not entirely just a social media campaign.  Actually, there's some people like myself who genuinely think Bcash sounds kind of cool.  That's the only time I'm going to refer to that; I'm not here to wind you up.

Roger Ver: I'm not going to get riled up, don't worry.

Peter McCormack: They actually think that's a cool name and, in hindsight, I understand why you want to keep Bitcoin in, but it is kind of cool.

Roger Ver: I agree if Bitcoin had never existed and Bitcoin wasn't known by hundreds of millions of people or billions of people around the world at this point and you wanted to start some brand-new currency, Bcash would be a just fine name, but that's not where we're at today.

Peter McCormack: No, of course.  But then you have to accept if you're accusing a social campaign of renaming it to discredit it and take the Bitcoin name away, it is hypocritical then to rename Bitcoin Bitcoin Core, because nobody else calls it that.  Let's be fair, we go on Coinbase or any exchange, it's Bitcoin.

Roger Ver: Bitcoin.com calls it that and that's a pretty popular website.

Peter McCormack: Who owns Bitcoin.com?

Roger Ver: I do.

Peter McCormack: There you go.

Roger Ver: To be fair --

Peter McCormack: There's no argument there.

Roger Ver: I don't want to give names to these people who hate, but the idea for it came from one of the major, major, major Bitcoin businesses in the world and they're the ones who presented the idea to me and they said that maybe they will be doing the same thing as well.  So, maybe we'll see some more businesses doing that exact same thing.

Peter McCormack: But this therefore for me is an attack, as much as calling Bitcoin Cash Bcash is an attack.

Roger Ver: Hold on; by calling the BTC version of Bitcoin, by calling it Bitcoin Core, that doesn't strip away its Bitcoin-ness in the name, whereas calling the BCH version of Bitcoin, calling it Bcash, that strips away its Bitcoin-ness.

Peter McCormack: Do you know what I think it does?  I think it harms both sides.

Roger Ver: Tell me why.

Peter McCormack: I think it's counterproductive and the confusion is counterproductive to both sides.  Firstly, essentially if we ignore all the other shitty little Bitcoins, we now have three Bitcoins: we have Bitcoin and Bitcoin Core, which are the same thing, and we have Bitcoin Cash.  That's a problem for new people coming in or people who don't understand, and it creates confusion.  Whereas if we have Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, we just have the two.  But by creating the confusion, it's also counterproductive to Bitcoin Cash, because if people don't understand which one's which, they don't understand which yours is.

Roger Ver: I'm not too worried about that in the long run, because as soon as people actually try using either one, they'll realise that Bitcoin Cash is the more useful version of the two.

Peter McCormack: That's a fair argument in the short term based on block size.  It's okay for you, you're a rich guy, very successful, made a lot of money.  People have lost money in the confusion, right?

Roger Ver: I don't think anybody has actually.

Peter McCormack: You don't think a single person has sent money to the wrong wallet or maybe recently bought Bitcoin Cash on Bitcoin.com thinking it was Bitcoin?  You don't think that's happened at all?  I can't get it now, but I could easily email you proof afterwards; we know it has happened.

Roger Ver: I don't think anybody has, to be honest; I think it's a bunch of people lying on the internet claiming that's happened.  For example, in our Bitcoin.com wallet, it supports both Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Cash.  The address formats are different, so it's impossible to send Bitcoin Core from our buy.bitcoin.com website; it's impossible for them to accidentally send that to the Bitcoin Cash address.

Peter McCormack: There are other instances, other wallets where you could.  Look, I'll be fair with you if you're fair with me; to say there's not been a single instance of somebody sending Bitcoin to Bitcoin Cash or vice versa I think is not fair.  I think it must have happened.

Roger Ver: With how many people there are in the world, that's probably happened somewhere, but I don't think it happened because of a confusion between the names Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Cash.  I think it's just there's lot of addresses floating around and lots of people doing lots of things.  Even I, I think I've sent some Bitcoin Core to a cash address or the other way around before, before they had different address formats.  I definitely qualify as an experienced cryptocurrency user and even I've done that.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, of course.

Roger Ver: But the money wasn't lost; it's just sitting at the other address and still perfectly tenable.  But our website's very, very clear on the differences between Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Cash and we have big, giant blog posts.

Peter McCormack: That wasn't entirely true last week.

Roger Ver: We have entire articles on the website, and we have almost 100 people working for Bitcoin.com.

Peter McCormack: You know what I'm referring to.

Roger Ver: You're referring to our block explorer that referred to Bitcoin Cash as just Bitcoin (BCH). 

Peter McCormack: That was obviously a conscious decision.

Roger Ver: I think it was a conscious decision by the person that managed that part of the website, yeah.  So, maybe in the future --

Peter McCormack: You can't probably name that person, right?  You don't want to expose them.

Roger Ver: I don't want to throw them under the bus.

Peter McCormack: But somebody within this building made that decision.

Roger Ver: Physically they're not in the building.

Peter McCormack: But somebody on the team made that decision.

Roger Ver: Sure.

Peter McCormack: How were they able to make that decision without somebody approving it?

Roger Ver: Well, somebody has to approve it and I don't approve every single last thing, so this person had access to that part of the website.  To be honest, I don't see --

Peter McCormack: You had no knowledge of it happening?

Roger Ver: I had knowledge after it happened.  I didn't know until it was already live on the website and people started complaining about it on the internet.  Then they made a Telegram chat group talking about how they're going to sue Bitcoin.com and they had some people in there that were scouring every inch of our website looking for inconsistencies where people might confuse Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Core, which was actually fantastic for us, because we had several people in that Telegram group watching all the stuff that they found and, "Oh, great.  Let's fix this, let's fix that", and so we had a whole bunch of people doing quality assurance testing on our website so we could go and fix all these little errors. 

So, for example, there was one page it was talking about Bitcoin Cash and there was an image of a guy holding the phone, but the image on the phone was of a Bitcoin Core wallet, so we changed that image and we changed all these things that they pointed out to us.  So, we were actually very thankful and happy that we had so many people scouring every inch of our website looking for mistakes.

Peter McCormack: Which is cool.

Roger Ver: We have a big website, mistakes happen.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I understand.  My background is web development.  I've managed big projects.

Roger Ver: Then you know.

Peter McCormack: But I also understand something at that level doesn't happen by accident.

Roger Ver: I think it was a very conscious decision on the part of the person that was in charge of that part of the website, yeah.  I don't disagree, I don't dispute that for one instant.

Peter McCormack: Then previously, I've seen you admit you don't employ sockpuppets, I'm not going to accuse you, but somebody --

Roger Ver: Thank you.  If you do accuse me of that, then I will get riled up.

Peter McCormack: I've flown 13 hours; I don't want you to rage quit this!  But you have also admitted you've had staff members who have done that and they've been disciplined.  There always seems to be an opportunity to blame somebody else or divert blame for things that are happening.  But I think potentially one of the problems is there's maybe a culture of creating confusion in the belief that by creating the confusion, that would be good for Bitcoin Cash.  But, like I say, I think it's bad for both sides.

Roger Ver: I think I want less confusion also.  That's why we built the whole website explaining the differences between Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Cash.  I agree that sometimes people get confused and sometimes it's confusing when people write things on one part of the website that aren't consistent with other parts of the website; that's a problem.  My end goal is to minimise the amount of confusion in the world.

Peter McCormack: Do you think if Bitcoin.com was managed by an independent party who had no affiliation to either side, the website and the app would be designed as it is now?

Roger Ver: I think Bitcoin Core should be managed by an independent third party -- I'm sorry, bitcoin.org, but that one certainly isn't.

Peter McCormack: That's not the question I asked.

Roger Ver: Okay.

Peter McCormack: You can ask me any questions afterwards, but my question to you is if Bitcoin.com, which is the domain with Bitcoin and we have multiple Bitcoins, but if that was managed by an independent third party with no affiliation, do you think the design of the website and the design of the app would be as they are now?

Roger Ver: No, of course not.  If it was designed by a different Bitcoin Cash supporter, it would be totally different though as well.  Everybody has different beliefs.

Peter McCormack: You've talked about the censorship on r/Bitcoin, but on the flip side you do have assets to use to your advantage which, if there had been no split, would be used for Bitcoin; so, it works both ways.

Roger Ver: I poured my heart and soul into promoting Bitcoin every way I possibly could from 2011 and you said you read the book, Digital Gold.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Roger Ver: Anybody that's read that book I don't think can question my devotion.

Peter McCormack: No, your money, you've been advertising, promoting.  I think a lot of people who haven't been in the space long enough don't realise about that.  But really, Bitcoin isn't you; you don't own Bitcoin.  You own the domain, but really shouldn't the domain be impartial?

Roger Ver: So, dotcom stands for commerce, so commercial.  Bitcoin.com is a commercial website with a goal to earn money and because we're earning money, we're able to employ almost 100 people at this point and we're still growing.  So, I don't think it needs to be impartial; I think it can be just fine running its business; just like paypal.com is not impartial in regards to describing or using PayPal.  Bitcoin.com doesn't need to be impartial in regards to describing or using Bitcoin. 

From my point of view, Bitcoin Cash is the best tool the world has ever seen to achieve more economic freedom and more economic freedom means less babies will die around the world.  I've seen a lot of people mocking me for that, but that's a real thing too.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but it's like appealing to altruism. 

Roger Ver: No, it's appealing to my own self-interest, because I want to live in a better world too.

Peter McCormack: I get that; I want to live in a better world.  Come on, you've probably got more money than any of us will ever see in our life and if that halved today, you would still be fine; it would make no difference to your life.  So, why don't you just go and give half your money away straightaway?  I don't buy this.

Roger Ver: That actually shows another thing that I think a lot of people that haven't studied economics deeply don't realise.  Let's say I have 1 million Bitcoins worth however many billions of dollars that it is at the moment.  If I do absolutely nothing with them, that actually helps the world's economy the most, because I have all this capital that I didn't deploy at all and that means that all the existing physical goods in the world get to be deployed for other things that other people want. 

Let's say I go and earn millions of dollars and I have the pieces of paper.  If I didn't go and light them on fire in my back yard, the rest of the world is that much wealthier, because I no longer have a claim on those resources.  So, if I'm not using any of the Bitcoins or if I destroy them, the rest of the world still has all the physical wealth out there that can be used for other things.

Peter McCormack: I don't understand what you just said there at all.  I don't understand what that means.

Roger Ver: Maybe I can explain it a little bit --

Peter McCormack: If you don't spend money, the world is a better place?  Surely, if you spend money on making the world a better place, it's a benefit?

Roger Ver: I'll give you a more concise example.  Inflation is caused by printing money.  Let's say there's a million units of currency in the world and the government goes and prints a million more units, then suddenly all the units that you had in your pocket are worth half as much.  But let's say there's a million units of currency in the world and I own 100,000 of them or 10% and they're in my pocket and I light them on fire, suddenly now all the units of currency that you have left in your pocket are worth more because the units that I had are never going to be out into circulation.

Peter McCormack: That's not going to trickle down.  If you're talking about babies dying, that's not going to trickle down to make any difference.

Roger Ver: No, but more economic freedom will and more people being able to engage in commerce and trade with other people round the world raises the rate of economic growth around the world and that means fewer babies will die at childbirth.  That is very, very, very clear and it's very frustrating when I hear Bitcoin Core supporters mock that sort of idea, but more economic freedom leads to a higher standard of living for everybody and a higher standard of living means fewer babies will die; it's just that simple.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I don't think people disagree with the economics.

Roger Ver: It's not specific to Bitcoin Cash either; it's just economic freedom in general.

Peter McCormack: I think what people tend to think, I think the reason people are mocking you for it is it's almost like --

Roger Ver: I think it's because they haven't studied economics.

Peter McCormack: No, no, no.

Roger Ver: But they don't realise that's the reason.

Peter McCormack: I don't think that's why people are mocking; I think people are mocking because they're, "How fucking ridiculous is this that we're having a debate about scaling and the argument is now about babies are dying?"

Roger Ver: So, for me the debate isn't abouts scaling; the debate is bringing as much economic freedom of the world as quickly as we possibly can.  The scaling debate has delayed the rate of adoption of cryptocurrencies around the world and delayed the rate of economic growth around the world, because we've had less economic freedom, because less cryptocurrencies have been adopted around the world.

Peter McCormack: No, listen, I don't disagree with wanting to roll out cryptocurrencies.  What I'm saying is when you come out with an argument that babies are dying, you're basically saying, "Agree with me, otherwise you're a baby killer" and it's a fucking pointless argument; we don't get anywhere, so you trap us in a corner.

Roger Ver: If you don't support economic freedom, you're a baby killer; plain and simple.  I'll say it just that clearly.  If you don't support more economic freedom, you are a baby killer.

Peter McCormack: But when you connect your vision to that, to baby killing, you're basically saying, "Agree with me or you're a baby killer".

Roger Ver: No, no, no.  You can disagree one step ahead, you can say that I don't think that the path that Roger's advocating for Bitcoin Cash leads to more economic freedom as quickly as the Bitcoin Core roadmap.  You can say all of us want more babies to survive childbirth and everybody to have a higher standard of living, but the policies that Roger's advocating in Bitcoin Cash don't lead to more economic freedom; the policies that Bitcoin Core is advocating do lead to more economic freedom.  You can make that argument; I think everybody wants fewer babies to die at childbirth.

Peter McCormack: Of course.

Roger Ver: So, I'm not saying that you're a baby killer if you support Bitcoin Core; I will say you're a baby killer if --

Peter McCormack: You're making the leap though.

Roger Ver: No.  I am trying to make an argument that Bitcoin Cash leads to more economic freedom for the world than Bitcoin Core does.  If you want to disagree, I'm more than happy to have an argument; not you personally but anybody in general.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I know.

Roger Ver: I will listen to those arguments and if you convince me that Bitcoin Core is going to bring more economic freedom to the world and more economic growth to the world, better than Bitcoin Cash will, I'll become a big giant Bitcoin Core supporter once again.

Peter McCormack: I think it's a very narrow way of looking at it.  One of my issues is, therefore, I think you alienate people from the debate; it's counterproductive for what you're trying to achieve with Bitcoin Cash, because no one will disagree that economic freedom leads to better opportunity, better healthcare.  But to make the leap from, "My approach to scaling is better for Bitcoin which will create more economic freedom which means less babies will die", you're just making the leap which traps people and it's fucking ridiculous.

Roger Ver: I'll ask you do you think $100 fees or $1,000 fees for on-chain transactions, as people like Adam Back are advocating for Bitcoin Core, do you think that'll lead to more or less economic freedom for the world?

Peter McCormack: Let's come back to that; I'll answer that.

Roger Ver: I answered your last question.

Peter McCormack: Well, no --

Roger Ver: After you called me… darn it!  Now it's my turn.

Peter McCormack: Actually, I listened to the Jameson Lopp interview and I find the whole optimisation of block space really interesting.  Having heard so many different debates about block sizes and scaling, that was the first time when I really felt, "Actually, this guy's right".  The couple of points that Jameson brought up which I thought that really nailed it for me, the first one was I'm a miner, block rewards are going to half in…

Roger Ver: June or something.

Peter McCormack: … was it June 2020 and if the prices haven't gone up, that's going to impact us.  And in four years' time, half again.  So, it's going to come to the point whereby if the value hasn't gone up, the mining rewards are going to become very important.  Therefore, if mining fees are close to zero and there aren't enough transactions, mining is not going to be as profitable, there might be less miners which means a less secure network.

Actually, I buy into the view that fees within a fee market is good because it supports the miners, as long as there is a good-functioning, second-layer network for cheap, lower fees, for smaller payments.  I get all that within my limited knowledge.  So, my issue is right now, where I am on your side, is that in the short term we've taken a backwards step by not just increasing the block size.  I think we could have easily gone to 2 megabytes, kept the fees down, increased the block size as needed to keep the fees down over the period where second-limb technologies are being developed, and once they're in place and proven, we can --

Roger Ver: Well, then let's use them.

Peter McCormack: And we could have even gone as far as, I mean Luke Dashjr thinks 300k.  Who knows what we need?  You don't know, I don't know.  I certainly think if this is a global currency that's used millions of times every day by millions of people, I can't see how on-chain scaling is the best idea.  I think it's a combination of the two; I'm in the middle.

Roger Ver: I completely agree; no, it is a combination of the two.  But the second-layer solutions weren't ready yet and the Bitcoin Core people intentionally strangled the ability that they --

Peter McCormack: You don't have any issue with the second layer?

Roger Ver: No, I'm just fine and I think that's another big misconception that's been propagated on the internet whether intentionally or through censorship or just through bad communication on the Bitcoin Cash side of people.  But we have no problem with layer 2 stuff at all; in fact, we're big fans of it but we're saying don't strangle layer 1 before layer 2 is ready yet.  Unfortunately, that's exactly what happened and it's easier for people to switch from Bitcoin to altcoins than it was for people to switch from Bitcoin to Lightning Network or layer 2 stuff.  That's exactly what will end up happening.

Peter McCormack: It's funny; I kept a list of things which I agree with and disagree with.  I've got things I agree with you on, and I've also got some things I disagree with.  One thing I completely disagree with as a trader is the Bitcoin dominance argument that you put across; that Bitcoin dominance dropped because the blocks were full.  I think it completely --

Roger Ver: Do you think it was just coincidence?

Peter McCormack: No, I think entrepreneurial spirit.  Where are the primary places that Bitcoin has lost dominance to?

Roger Ver: I'm sorry, where's…?

Peter McCormack: What altcoins?

Roger Ver: Ethereum, of course.

Peter McCormack: Ethereum?

Roger Ver: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Just Ethereum?  Where else?

Roger Ver: Ethereum, Dash, Litecoin.

Peter McCormack: Dash.  Anymore?

Roger Ver: Yes, probably Monero and Zcash too.

Peter McCormack: Ripple?

Roger Ver: And some Ripple too, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Are you invested in Ripple?

Roger Ver: Yes.

Peter McCormack: Okay.  You completely forget the argument of entrepreneurial spirit and that people want to do their own things.  I believe that there were coins being created back in 2013, 2012.

Roger Ver: None of them got any traction until Bitcoin's blocks became full.

Peter McCormack: Actually, in fairness Litecoin got a bit of traction when it was seen as the secondary option to Bitcoin.  Honestly, I meet people all the time and very, very few people are transacting with cryptocurrencies.  I pay my mining fees with it, I bought my mining equipment with it, I pay some of my staff with it and that's about it from day to day.

Roger Ver: Which cryptocurrency are you using for all those things?

Peter McCormack: I used Bitcoin Cash for my mining equipment, because I had to, and actually it was quite a cool experience.  Well actually no, it was a really nerve-wracking experience sending $200,000 to a stream of characters and just waiting.

Roger Ver: You sent it away on the internet.

Peter McCormack: What's the biggest you've ever done?

Roger Ver: A lot.

Peter McCormack: Yeah?

Roger Ver: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Do you still get that moment?

Roger Ver: Yeah, I still doublecheck the addresses a little bit carefully, yeah.

Peter McCormack: So, I've used Bitcoin Cash for that, for my mining fees; and my electricity costs I pay in Bitcoin.  And I just have a preference.

Roger Ver: What do you think about the arguments for people that are doing Bitcoin mining when the fees become $50 for a single transaction, and the Bitcoin Network squeezes out the individual miners or the small-time miners because the network fee winds up becoming such a big percentage of the amount of Bitcoin that they're able to earn each day?  It incentivises big, giant mining companies, because $50 for one transaction if you mine $5,000 worth of Bitcoin isn't such a big deal, whereas if you only mined $100 for the whole weeks' worth of Bitcoin and the fee is going to be $50 to withdraw that…

Peter McCormack: I think it's a real shame and I think that's part of a capitalist society; it's no different from going to a normal high street and seeing small businesses being edged out because they can't afford the rent.

Roger Ver: Bitcoin Cash doesn't have that problem with the low fees, so individual miners with just one single S9 in their bedroom at home can still mine on Bitcoin Cash and the fees aren't a problem there.

Peter McCormack: I can mine on one S9 at the moment with Bitcoin and it's fine.

Roger Ver: Because the Bitcoin transactions on Bitcoin Core are at an all-time low for the last two years, because fewer people are using Bitcoin than previously.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but there's counterarguments with that and we've jumped around.  There's counterarguments to that in that exchanges have become more efficient in batching transactions.

Roger Ver: Which degrades the privacy that people have with their Bitcoins, which hurts the fungibility of Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: This is where we go round, because Bitcoin Cash affected privacy because people had to expose their wallets to receive their Bitcoin Cash.  We can go round in circles; we're not going to achieve anything by jumping back and forth. 

Let's go back to the Bitcoin dominance argument.  I believe, even if we'd had a block size increase, Bitcoin dominance would have fallen, because there is an incentive to create altcoins and there's an incentive to create tokens and there's an incentive to create other projects.  I think many of these projects, once the exchanges started launching and having all these different currencies and tokens to trade and the opportunity to speculate -- I mean, you've invested in some, right?

Roger Ver: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Why did you invest in Ripple?

Roger Ver: So, I invested in Ripple I think back in 2011 or 2012.  I actually put up the seed money to start Ripple, and the idea at the time was that we could make a version of Bitcoin that didn't require mining.  The price of Bitcoin at the time of my investment with Ripple was $1 or $2, maybe $3.

Peter McCormack: It's an alternate use case, right?

Roger Ver: No, no.  The idea for Ripple was to have Bitcoin --

Peter McCormack: But it's an altcoin.

Roger Ver: It is an altcoin.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Roger Ver: But the idea for it was to have Bitcoin that didn't require mining, because according to the original creator of Ripple, mining was wasteful and we can do it without needing mining.

Peter McCormack: But it's an altcoin.

Roger Ver: Sure.

Peter McCormack: As I understand it, you invest in Dash?

Roger Ver: I own some Dash, yeah, but I didn't buy any Dash at all.  So, the only altcoin I'd ever owned ever, until much more recently, was Ripple when I put up the money to help start it when Bitcoin didn't have any traction, I don't think there was BitPay yet, there wasn't really any commercial traction really for Bitcoin yet.  I didn't buy any altcoins at all until I became scared about Bitcoin's scalability and the blocks becoming full and that's what made me decide to diversify into some altcoins.  The amount of Dash that I own is very, very, very small.

Peter McCormack: Come on, come on, outside of you everybody wants to make money, everybody wants the opportunity, everybody wants to be as rich as Roger Ver, everybody wants to be wealthy and just improve their lives.

Roger Ver: Sure and economic freedom helps everybody, be that across the globe.

Peter McCormack: Which we've covered.  But with altcoins I --

Roger Ver: People feel like they're going to get a second chance at picking a winner.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, of course they are.

Roger Ver: Sure.

Peter McCormack: So, I just think that every time I hear you talk about Bitcoin's dominance -- do you honestly believe Bitcoin would be at 90% dominance?  Absolutely not, it wouldn't have been.  There was almost zero chance.

Roger Ver: I think there's a really good chance that it would be somewhere, because all these tokens and things that we see happening would have and could have been built on top of Bitcoin, but the Bitcoin Core developers were openly hostile to it.  So, Vitalik initially looked at building Ethereum on top of Bitcoin.  The Bitcoin Core developers were busy shortening the amount of data that could be put in the opportune section of it, so he decided, "Well, I guess I won't be able to build this on top of Bitcoin; I'll do my own thing".

Peter McCormack: I think he still would have built it separately anyway.

Roger Ver: He's openly said that one of the main places that he was looking originally was Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: It was just an option, but there is entrepreneurial spirit, there is investment opportunity, there's speculation.  I think if you're going to make arguments, make them ones that people can get behind.  Market dominance would have fallen.

Roger Ver: Here's another reason why I don't think that's the case.  The reason that Bitcoin wound up having much value, or the value that it does today, is that it started to be used in commerce.  Initially, we had the Silk Road and then later we had all sorts of normal businesses using Bitcoin in commerce, and because you can spend it anywhere, people became willing to store their value in it because they knew that they could spend it in these various places.

Peter McCormack: My first use.

Roger Ver: So, in order for any of these digital currencies out there to have a value and have a price is eventually you need to have some secondary use case; the primary one is usefulness in commerce.  If you don't have that usefulness in commerce side, I don't think you're going to be picking a winner that's going to the moon.

Peter McCormack: They're not all commerce solutions, there's asset tokenisation.

Roger Ver: Well, that's a security too.

Peter McCormack: There's ICOs, there is the use of blockchain for things outside of commerce and that's why I'm saying I think dominance would have fallen anyway. Maybe it wouldn't be as low as it is, but I still think you've taken away part of the dominance.

Roger Ver: Sure.  I just told you the reason I took away part of the dominance is because I was worried about Bitcoin's scalability in the future, not due to any technical problems but due to these social problems.

Peter McCormack: Let me ask you another question.  If you could go back, if we can go back two years, three years, you obviously had a relationship of some kind with the Core team; you knew them, you spoke to them.

Roger Ver: I had a very nice dinner with Adam Back before.

Peter McCormack: At some point, things went wrong; you've fallen out with them in one way or another, had a disagreement on things.  If you could go back, would you have done anything different?  Would you have a different approach or are you perfectly happy with where we are right now?

Roger Ver: If I had a time machine and I could go back, I would have screamed and shouted and complained much, much, much more vigorously when the censorship started, and I didn't speak out loudly enough against the censorship that's still going on to this very day.  So, my biggest regret is that I didn't speak out more strongly against the censorship.  

I think my biggest mistake was not realising just how big of an impact this censorship would have, because when the censorship first started, the very top, most upvoted thread I think ever in the history of r/Bitcoin was to remove Theymos as a moderator, because everybody was in open revolt due to the censorship.  People said, "F this, we don't need censorship.  This is Bitcoin, we don't do censorship here".  Then that thread was censored from r/Bitcoin.

Now, today we have a whole bunch of people that came to Bitcoin much more recently and they have no idea what the history of Bitcoin is, they have no idea about the censorship that was going on, they have no idea that the plan from day one was just to allow the blocks to increase as Bitcoin became more popular.  All these people that came to Bitcoin more recently, now they think that I am the evil boogieman trying to destroy Bitcoin, whereas in reality I've poured my heart and soul into helping cryptocurrencies be adopted worldwide as fast as I possibly can.

So, if I had that time machine to go back, I would have complained about the censorship even more strongly than I did.

Peter McCormack: Are you, therefore, putting it all down to Theymos; we're exactly where we are just because of Theymos?

Roger Ver: It's not 100% him, but a huge amount of the blame lies at his feet with the censorship; censorship is unforgivable.

Peter McCormack: It seems to me there's a lot of really smart people within the Core team who have an approach and have ideas about how to scale Bitcoin.

Roger Ver: A lot of these people are really, really smart people.

Peter McCormack: And you keep saying they want to destroy Bitcoin and they want to --

Roger Ver: No, I don't think I've ever said they want to destroy Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: They want it to be slow and expensive and I don't think they do.

Roger Ver: That they do, and I have direct quotes and I put together a whole presentation on that.

Peter McCormack: If they want it to be slow and expensive, why do they support Lightning Network? 

Roger Ver: So, Lightning Network Bitcoins aren't Bitcoins; they're IOUs for Bitcoins to be settled on the network later, and that's a very big difference.  There's actual quotes from Adam Back, the CEO of Blockstream, where he says he doesn't think that people would have a problem paying $100 per transaction, and there's lots of quotes from these people saying that the fees becoming high are a good thing. 

Tuur Demeester, another one of these big Bitcoin Core supporters, is busy saying that he was looking forward to when the fees for on-chain transactions in the Bitcoin network are $1,000 each.  I have news for Tuur and everybody else, is that people aren't going to pay $1,000 fees; they're going to switch to something else and that's what we've seen happening.

Peter McCormack: If your voice had been louder, how do you think things would have panned out differently?

Roger Ver: I don't know, but I think if the censorship hadn't happened, whether or not that was because my voice was louder, I think if the censorship hadn't happened, I think Bitcoin would have continued on its original path to where the block size would have increased and we would have had adoption from companies like Facebook and PayPal. 

I know of a company that still has more than 100 million monthly active users that was busy -- in 2014, I think I met with them for the first time, maybe it was 2015, they were busy looking into integrating Bitcoin wallets into all of their 100 million monthly active users.  That would essentially have maybe 20X increased the number of people that could use Bitcoin from that time, and those plans were either completely put on hold or cancelled at this point.

Peter McCormack: Who was that?

Roger Ver: I can't say the company name and I'm sure they weren't the only one, but it was an instant messaging platform.

Peter McCormack: Why don't they just take Bitcoin Cash now then?

Roger Ver: Hopefully, they will be soon.

Peter McCormack: They will?

Roger Ver: We just saw one with 33 million users on eChat announce this morning that they're doing that.

Peter McCormack: That you mentioned.

Roger Ver: That seems to be a pretty big deal.  I wasn't familiar with that app previously, but I think I'm going to have to download it and give it a try now. 

Jeff Garzik talked about this a lot, the Fidelity problem.  A lot of businesses looked at Bitcoin even before the blocks had become full; they said, "Oh well, if we bring all the users onto this, we'd need blocks that are bigger than 1 megabyte would ever be; we'd fill the blocks instantly.  So, I guess Bitcoin doesn't have the capacity for us, so we'll do something else". 

Whereas Bitcoin Cash, in a couple more days here, they're going to fork to the maximum block size at 32 megabytes from the 8 megabytes that it is today.  That doesn't mean the blocks are going to be 32 megabytes overnight, but it means that companies like Fidelity or Facebook or Telegram or take your pick, they're going to look and say, "Oh, Bitcoin Cash does have the capacity if we were to bring all the users on board.  They could handle our user base", and people are going to start building on top of Bitcoin Cash.  Whereas, if they look at Bitcoin Core today… Lightning Network I hope it works, I hope it's fantastic, but the fact of the matter is it doesn't today and it probably won't for a long, long time.

Peter McCormack: These things take time, right?

Roger Ver: And they do take time.

Peter McCormack: But there does appear to be some really clever, brilliant minds working on this and I can't believe they're just deluded fools.

Roger Ver: They're clever, brilliant minds within their domain.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Roger Ver: Adam Back is a much, much, much, much better cryptographer than I am, so is Greg Maxwell.  Both of those people have no clue when it comes to economics, both those people have no clue when it comes to running a business either, otherwise they would be out there doing that; they have no experience in that field.  It doesn't mean they're stupid people.  If you asked me to go out there and design a new cryptographic system for some new digital currency, I would take years or decades of study in that field before I'd be able to do something even remotely competent.

Peter McCormack: It would need both.

Roger Ver: Absolutely need both.

Peter McCormack: Two questions for you then: where are the brilliant cryptographers here?

Roger Ver: We have some fantastic developers on Bitcoin Cash, absolutely.  If you look at Mike Hearn, he was a professional capacity planner for Google, one of the most popular websites in the entire world.  He said, "Hey, we need to plan for Bitcoin to have more capacity so we can get people using it" and a bunch of these people basically drove him from the project.  If that's not some fantastic experience being a professional capacity planner for Google, if that's not a fantastic experience for planning for Bitcoin's future, nothing is.

Peter McCormack: Okay.  If you had to self-reflect, where would a fair criticism of you be then?

Roger Ver: Self-reflection's hard.

Peter McCormack: It's not.  I can tell you that I am crap at tech and that's why I'm not debating really deep technical things with you.  I am a little bit disorganised and sometimes turn up to things late.  That's self-reflection.

Roger Ver: Okay.

Peter McCormack: Because, you give a really solid argument, every argument has a solid counterargument.  One thing I never hear from you is, "Do you know what?  I think they're right.  Oh shit, I got that wrong".  I'm just interested, because you've got a lot of pressure on your shoulders.

Roger Ver: Yeah, I can give you an exact example of that.  There's a YouTube video of me saying, "We're still lucky to have the Core team and I'm so thankful to have people like…" and I think I name names like Adam Back and Greg Maxwell and these other people.  There's a video of me on YouTube saying, "We are so lucky in the Bitcoin community to have these people".  I was wrong.

Peter McCormack: That's not what I mean.

Roger Ver: I was wrong.

Peter McCormack: That's not what I mean.  That's almost a perfect example; I've seen loads of times where there's always a video and I've watched one this morning on Steemit where you're defending lies against yourself.  There's always a counterargument to an argument, I'm just saying…

Roger Ver: There's a lot of lies about me out there on the internet and it's hard to correct them with all the censorship that's been going on about Bitcoin.  That's not to say I'm not perfect; there's no such as thing as real Jesus, right.

Peter McCormack: Come on, where are you at fault?

Roger Ver: Plenty of things.

Peter McCormack: Name me some.

Roger Ver: In Bitcoin specifically or my life in general?

Peter McCormack: Whatever you want to tell me, but it would be good because I'm trying to understand you, I'm trying to understand what your motivations are, but also you've got the weight, it feels like you're carrying the weight of Bitcoin and the world on your shoulders and you've got to get this right.  But you seem to be quite isolated doing it; you're there on your own and you've maybe got a bit of Craig Wright and a bit of Calvin, whereas there's a whole group of people on the Bitcoin side who will work together.

Roger Ver: Everybody that supports the big block side of things, they see what happens to me and how you get attacked constantly.  We saw what happened to Brian Armstrong, he used to be very strongly in favour of on-chain scaling and beta blocks for Bitcoin, and he was attacked viciously by Bitcoin Core's supporters; Coinbase was removed from Bitcoin.org as even being listed as a Bitcoin website where people can buy Bitcoin.  Eventually, he just got tired with it and moved on with his life and moved on with his Bitcoin. 

The same thing happened with Mike Hearn and Gavin Andresen and a bunch of other people and a bunch of people that are still CEOs of big, giant cryptocurrency businesses and cryptocurrency wallets that used to be Bitcoin businesses and Bitcoin wallets, and because of the Bitcoin scalability issues they're now cryptocurrency exchange and crypto coin wallets.  But they contacted me privately lots of times and still recently saying, "Hey Roger, thank you for continuing to speak out.  Thank you, I'm glad I don't have to do that but you're on the right side of this.  Keep going".

Peter McCormack: Which is cool, but again, back to my point.

Roger Ver: Yeah, where have I made mistakes?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, come on.  Where are the fair criticisms of you?  What have you got wrong and fucked up in this process?  You know what I think?  I don't think anyone really hears this and I think if they hear that, if they can hear your mistakes and the things you got wrong, they're going to buy your other arguments.  But if everything thrown at you has a counterargument, a defence, a YouTube video you can point them to, it's, "Well, this guy's never fucking wrong".

Roger Ver: I'm sure I'm wrong about lots of things, but that's the thing about being wrong is when you make the mistake, you don't realise that it's a mistake or you wouldn't have made it.  Looking back on your past and recognising those things as mistakes, that's hard to do.  But I can tell you one: I absolutely should not have given John Carvalho the middle finger, I absolutely should not have done that.  I apologise for that.

Peter McCormack: He was winding you up, I don't think anyone had a problem with the middle finger.  Do you know what I think people had a problem with?

Roger Ver: Tell me.

Peter McCormack: I think people had a problem with the way you kind of belittled his business at first and then you also use the argument, "I'm a multi-millionaire".  Look, we've all been wound up at times and stuck our middle fingers up and he was goading you, he set out to goad you, which is a shame because actually I think he put some really good arguments in through the whole process.  I think if that hadn't have ended like that, it was a solid interview.  Now, people just look at it as a meme for you and miss out on the solid debate beforehand.  But I don't think people cared about the middle finger; that's just the ammo you gave them.

Roger Ver: Okay.  I think you're right about this too.  The argument that I already made a bunch of money isn't an argument that people enjoy and find persuasive, so I think you're right about that; there's better arguments to be made.  But an argument that I do think is accurate that I've seen time and time again is that so many of these Bitcoin Core supporters, they don't actually use Bitcoin, they don't have Bitcoin wallets on their phones, they don't use then to pay for things.

Peter McCormack: We're doing it again; we're doing it again.  This is brilliant, it's really cool to hear you admit something and I find that really interesting, but that's been counteractive to, "I'm going to go and do a Bitcoin Core thing". 

Roger Ver: Here's, I guess, the reason why I support Bitcoin Cash: I had definitely made some money before Bitcoin had ever been invented and I made a heck of a lot more of it through Bitcoin, but it was by using it in commerce and using it to pay people all around the world all day, every day and appreciating Bitcoin's usefulness as money. 

You said one of your other very recent interviews was with Lyn Ulbricht, the mother of Ross Ulbricht.  That's probably one of the most successful start-ups, not just Bitcoin start-ups, start-ups ever in the entire history of the world; he's one of the most successful entrepreneurs ever by using Bitcoin in commerce.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Roger Ver: Whereas I've had discussions or debates with people like Jimmy Song and Tone Vays and others.  I asked them, "Hey, get out your Bitcoin wallet.  I'm going to send you some Bitcoin right now" and they don't have Bitcoin wallets.

Peter McCormack: What's this got to do with the question I just asked you?

Roger Ver: I think it has to do with the mentality between both sides.  I was trying to argue that I made a whole bunch of money through Bitcoin so you should listen to me, and the other side --

Peter McCormack: You said, "I've made a whole bunch of money before I got into Bitcoin".

Roger Ver: Which is true.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Roger Ver: But then I used that bunch of money that I made to buy a bunch of Bitcoin and that's done even better.

Peter McCormack: I wonder whether you've just had so many attacks now, your auto-response is defence and your auto-defence is, "Bitcoin Core's terrible".  For me, trying my best to be impartial, trying my best to see both sides, is a hard thing to do because I'm sure from this, people are going to say, "Oh, you didn't attack Roger enough", "Oh, you said some things which are good for Bitcoin Cash, you're a fucking idiot", I'm going to get that.

Roger Ver: Welcome to the club!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, welcome to the club and I'm trying to be as impartial as I can.  I told you long term I believe Bitcoin, what you would call Bitcoin Core, what I would call Bitcoin, is on the right path.  I think it's a shame --

Roger Ver: Do you?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Roger Ver: What is the right path?

Peter McCormack: I think -- no, I'm going to answer that shortly because we are deviating from my point.

Roger Ver: Okay.

Peter McCormack: This is one of the first times I've seen you admit something like a weakness and a fault, and actually your whole demeanour's changed.  I feel like I'm not sat across defensive Roger who's arguing with everybody; I feel like I'm sat across the person Roger, and that's really interesting.

Roger Ver: I think also because you're not here trying to push my buttons like John Carvalho was intentionally.  Thank you.

Peter McCormack: I am trying to push your buttons, but I'm trying to push different buttons.

Roger Ver: Okay.  You're pushing them in a way that I'm enjoying; I'm really enjoying our conversation.

Peter McCormack: I think it's really good to admit that.  I think there's plenty of other mistakes you've probably made.

Roger Ver: Sure.

Peter McCormack: I've made mistakes, that's probably why I'm divorced.  Andreas, I think what happened with Andreas.

Roger Ver: I think people completely misinterpreted what I said.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but the point was is that --

Roger Ver: Then spun it around to use it to attack me.  That's what I think happened there.

Peter McCormack: I think the point was is that, if there's almost any chance to jump on and promote Bitcoin Cash, you use it.  That felt like, rather than looking at the real issue, it's the same --

Roger Ver: That tweet about if Andreas had held on to even $200 worth of Bitcoin, he'd be a millionaire today?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Roger Ver: That wasn't an attack or insult on Andreas; that was simply just a statement of fact.  But here's an attack or insult on Andreas that I'll give right now: Andreas, you need to speak out about the censorship that's going on.  It's absolutely unforgivable that you're not shouting from high heaven about the censorship that's going on within the community.  Just because the censorship is supporting a position that you might take doesn't mean that the censorship is okay.  So, shame on you, Andreas, for not speaking out against the censorship.  In regards to that --

Peter McCormack: I'm not sure he listens to my show, but maybe he will listen to this one!

Roger Ver: Maybe.  In regards to patents, you mentioned earlier, Craig Wright seems to be a big fan of patents.  I think patents are an illegitimate, government-granted monopoly and shouldn't even exist.  I'll say that flat out, patents are illegitimate and I don't support the very concept of patents, so shame on anybody that's busy applying for patents.

Peter McCormack: Let's talk about Craig, let's talk about Craig because I met him.  I don't believe he's Satoshi.  I said if Satoshi was a bunch of people, he might be one of them and he might have been involved early on.  I don't believe he's Satoshi.  I think his involvement in Bitcoin Cash is counterproductive to what you're trying to achieve.  I think he actually turns people off and I think his whole approach to patents is completely against everything which Bitcoin originally stood for.  What are your thoughts on that?

Roger Ver: I completely agree on the patent front.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so are you challenging him on this?

Roger Ver: Yeah.  We're recording this, this is going to go on the internet at some point.

Peter McCormack: Have you had the open discussion with him?  Have you said, "Come on, Craig, what the fuck are you doing here, mate?"

Roger Ver: I don't think we've had the patent talk, but I'll tell you: hey, Craig, if you ever wind up listening to this, patents are not cool, not okay; please don't.

Peter McCormack: Do you think it needs a bit more than just a slight mention like that?

Roger Ver: What?  Be as forceful as you'd like, patents are --

Peter McCormack: Don't you think you should be sitting down with him and having a chat?

Roger Ver: I don't have tea with those guys.  I see them occasionally and the next time I see him, I'll mention to him, "Hey, patents are an illegitimate government-granted monopoly that stifles the rate of economic growth of the entire world".  So, I'm philosophically and economically opposed to the very idea of patents.  I think that's pretty straightforward, right.

Peter McCormack: I do, I do.  I'm just surprised you haven't had the direct conversation with him about that.

Roger Ver: I think a lot of people think that I'm busy conspiring every day with Craig or Henri or all these.

Peter McCormack: No, but you know him.

Roger Ver: I do know him, but I'm busy at the office here every single day working with my Bitcoin.com team and Craig's off in London or wherever he is.

Peter McCormack: I know.

Roger Ver: I know it's far easier for you to have the patent talk with him than it is for me.

Peter McCormack: When I spoke with him, I just go round in circles and get lost.  What did you make of what Vitalik said about he shouldn't be allowed at conferences because he's a fraud?

Roger Ver: I disagree with Vitalik on that front.

Peter McCormack: Okay, and why is that?  And I'm not agreeing or disagreeing, by the way.

Roger Ver: I think Craig Wright has some really, really interesting things to say and I think that they're worth hearing.  Maybe he's wrong about some things, but maybe he's right about some other things.  I've learned a lot of things from him that I didn't know previously about Bitcoin specifically, as well as a number of other things, so I found my conversations with him to be very, very, very interesting.  But like lots of really, really smart people, he can be a bit of a difficult character, but that's the world we live in and that's okay, and I don't think that Craig needs to be shunned from conferences or that sort of thing.

Peter McCormack: Do you think he's Satoshi?

Roger Ver: I don't think I want to make a public statement one way or another in regards to that.

Peter McCormack: Am I allowed to interpret your body language?

Roger Ver: I don't think I shifted positions, but feel free!

Peter McCormack: I interpret your body language there as --

Roger Ver: You know what I'll tell you, I'll tell you I honestly don't know, but I definitely would not rule it out.  But I don't think he's the one and only Satoshi and even Craig claims that there are multiple people involved and that he was just a part of it.  At the end of the day, if I can add one more, I don't think it matters.

Peter McCormack: I think it matters.

Roger Ver: Tell me why.

Peter McCormack: If he was, which he isn't, but if he was, I think it destroys the hero picture everybody has of Satoshi, because he admitted to me he's a bit of a dick.  He said that and he is; he doesn't come across as a libertarian and he doesn't come across about anyone who really cares about anyone but themselves.  He actually comes across as a bit of a sociopath, if you ask me.  I think that kills the dream for a lot of people.

Roger Ver: They always say, "Don't ever meet your heroes".

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but the bigger issue is also the potential there's a liquid 1 million Bitcoins or so which could enter the ecosystem which isn't great.  Also then, his opinion will matter in a different way.  I don't like the argument, "Satoshi's vision", I really don't. 

Roger Ver: I agree.

Peter McCormack: Hold on, you did a conference and called it.

Roger Ver: I didn't do a conference.

Peter McCormack: Come on!  You must have been involved in the conference, right?

Roger Ver: We gave them some money to sponsor the conference, but we sponsor almost every conference that's happening.

Peter McCormack: But you often talk about Satoshi's vision, Satoshi's whitepaper.  Do you know what, I'll tell you why it really bothers me; it's because, unless he's here to defend himself or give an argument or counterargument, we're putting words in the mouth of either a dead person or a person who doesn't want to give their opinion anymore.

Roger Ver: So, I don't think that we should support Satoshi's vision, because it's Satoshi's vision.  I think we should support it because we have seven or eight years of empirical evidence showing that it worked and worked incredibly well.  I think it's the empirical evidence that's the important part and not the fact that it was Satoshi's vision.

Peter McCormack: Empirical evidence on the block size, up until the point the blocks were full.

Roger Ver: Bitcoin had massive adoption around the world and was gaining steam every single year with more and more transactions happening every year.

Peter McCormack: I don't disagree with you; I don't disagree with you.

Roger Ver: As soon as the blocks became full, the adoption rate reversed.

Peter McCormack: Don't disagree with you on some of that, but I do believe that the people who are developing on Bitcoin Core are trying to build something that is, as I think Jameson put it, multi-generational, that's going to work in 10, 20, 30 years.  A continual increase in the block size might not work.

Roger Ver: I think you're wrong about that thanks to Moore's Law; just increasing the block size is a long-term scaling solution, because computers are going to get faster and better and cheaper every single year; that's been happening for decades and it's going to continue to happen for decades.

Peter McCormack: But we don't know that it will work, the same as we don't know Lightning Network will work.  It's a theory --

Roger Ver: Which do you think is a bigger risk; you think that the putting all of our risk on the fact that Moore's Law will continue and it has decades, or putting our risk in faith and hope in that Lightning Network will be able to be created, something that's never existed ever and has no past track record?

Peter McCormack: I wouldn't even argue, because there are people who are smarter and better at this than me and know about it.

Roger Ver: What do you think with your smartness and intellect?

Peter McCormack: I think it's cool that both are happening because we will see which one works.

Roger Ver: Okay, I agree with that.

Peter McCormack: Do you know what?  We will see in ten years' time and probably both will exist.  Back to Craig being Satoshi, I think that would be very bad and I think Satoshi staying anonymous is much better for the world.  With the Kleiman case, everything might change.

Roger Ver: Some interesting evidence in there.

Peter McCormack: There is definitely some interesting evidence and I think there's probably more to come.

Roger Ver: There's a British reporter you should interview, I forget his name.  Andrew Corrigan or something like that, that wrote the -- it's an hour-long read or so, it's almost like a miniature book, but with all the stuff that went on, he seems to be convinced that Craig is Satoshi from the way I read it, which was interesting and surprising to me.

Peter McCormack: I think a few people are, but I think there's enough doubts.

Roger Ver: Was that your takeaway as someone who doesn't think Craig is Satoshi?  Do you think that Andrew thought, at the end of it all, that Craig was Satoshi?

Peter McCormack: I think he left doubt himself.  Probably, like a few people, he had a suspicion he might be.  It's funny, I think most people who claim he isn't, claim he isn't because they don't want him to be, and there isn't enough technical evidence, some very smart people.  I think those who claim he is don't have enough proof that he is, and I think Craig likes living in this world where he might not be.  In my view, the only way he is is he was part of the team and has edged his way in there, possibly waited for people to die, as sad as that sounds, for him to go and claim the crown, but I don't believe he's him.

Roger Ver: You think he was part of the team?

Peter McCormack: Part or close to them.  You know what?  He could have been somebody who was brought in as a salesman, I don't know!  It's something I don't even know or understand, but I don't believe the way he behaves now; I don't believe that is the same person, but I believe he could have been involved.  I don't think he's good for the crypto community personally.  I enjoyed meeting him, I enjoyed our interview, but I just think he brings too much negativity in. 

You're talking about economic freedom; he really just seems to be interested in lining his own pockets and that's a very different person from you and a very different person from a lot of people in the community.  I just don't think he's good.  But then, saying that, I don't agree with Vitalik trying to essentially censor him, because I don't know what that achieves. 

What's the end goal here, let's go back to that; the end goal for you?  When do you feel like you've achieved and will there become a time when you can step away from this, because this must suck a lot away from your life?

Roger Ver: I'm enjoying it each day so it's okay.  My end goal's to see a complete separation of money and state in which governments are no longer in control of the money supply.  Then from there, I would like to see a complete separation of society and state or the people in the state, because I don't think we need one centralised group of people bossing everybody else around.

Peter McCormack: How do you think that actually happens?  How do you envisage the scenario where money and state are separated; what are the steps?

Roger Ver: I think it's through technology, not through lobbying and begging for permission from the people that claim the right to rule over us.  If you have a slave master and you ask your slave master for permission not to be a slave anymore, of course it's going to tell you no.  I think that's the end result from lobbying and politicking. 

Whereas if we can build the tools to where, technologically, the state is powerless to prevent people from controlling their own destiny and their own finances and their own economic activity, well that's a much, much, much more powerful tool than lobbying for politicians to do something.  So, I want to build the technological tools to empower the individual to have more control over their own lives.

Peter McCormack: Do you see that first happening in a country like Venezuela where it's at almost economic collapse, where people are transacting using Bitcoin because they have to?  Do you see it coming from that way?

Roger Ver: No, I think it can come from any individual anywhere in the world that winds up with the mindset, "Hey, I can control my own destiny.  I can control my own life.  Thanks to the invention of cryptocurrencies, I can do what I want financially".  I think that's powerful.

Peter McCormack: Aren't you starting your own country-ish?

Roger Ver: We're looking to start our own non-country and hopefully we can find a jurisdiction somewhere in the world that will sell us a big swathe of land and grant us sovereignty with that land and then we'll set up the world's first non-country.

Peter McCormack: How's that going?

Roger Ver: The main guy behind it unfortunately has been having a lot of issues with his existing government giving him a hard time, so he's been distracted with those issues.  But I think he has most of them resolved at this point, so hopefully that'll be back on track and full steam ahead here, since I've been a bit of the spokesperson for it whereas he's been the guy that's supposed to actually do the legwork for it.  Unfortunately, he's had that slight delay, but hopefully he'll be back on track soon.

Peter McCormack: I think it's in India, I can't remember the name of it, which is a separate state.  Do you know the place I mean?

Roger Ver: There's quite a few places around the world that have things like that going on.  Another one that of course I'd love to mention is Liberland, which is a slice of land between Croatia and Serbia that both countries are claiming doesn't belong to them.  This one smart guy came and said, "Yeah, okay.  This is now Liberland", and he's trying to start the world's first anarcho-capitalist, more of a country than the one the Free Society Project is working on, but it'll still be pretty darn good where all taxes are voluntary and all government services, you interact with them voluntarily.  So, myself and Bitcoin.com, we've been supporting them in a major way as well.

Peter McCormack: Do you think that can happen?  Do you think this can happen globally?

Roger Ver: If you think that it can't happen, you're right.  If you think that something can happen, you might be right.  So, thinking that something's impossible, that's no fun.  So, of course, if you don't try, you're guaranteed not to succeed, so we're going to try in as many places around the world with as many different routes and methods to liberate more people around the world from centralised control of politicians, and hopefully at least one of them will succeed.

Peter McCormack: You denounced your citizenship to America --

Roger Ver: I have a question for you.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Roger Ver: I see so many people saying, and I will gladly denounce, with a "D", the very concept of citizenship.

Peter McCormack: I read something or did I read that wrong?

Roger Ver: The actual term is "renouncing", so I've renounced, but everyone is saying "denouncing", which to me has a very different connotation.  I'm happy to denounce the very idea of citizenship, but what I actually did in regards to my US censorship was renounced my US citizenship with an "R" and I haven't been living in the US for well over a decade.

Peter McCormack: Why was that?  I know obviously you've spent some time in prison.

Roger Ver: Yeah, that was the main reason.  They treated me incredibly unfairly in the US and I didn't want to have anything to do with those people, so I initially moved out of the country.  Then when I saw Bitcoin coming along, I realised the US government's probably going to cause all sorts of trouble for people using Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: What was prison like?

Roger Ver: Mainly it was really boring from day to day.

Peter McCormack: Really?

Roger Ver: With occasional moments of incredible excitement, but incredible in a bad way.  If things are exciting in prison, it's not for a good reason.

Peter McCormack: Right, okay, because shit's kicking off.

Roger Ver: Because bad things are happening, yeah.  You don't want to have exciting times in prison.  For the most part, every day is just really, really boring more than anything else, but if I start telling prison stories, this one will get into being even longer than it is already.

Peter McCormack: Have you got one?

Roger Ver: Yeah, I have a lot, but you know what, I think if you don't mind I'm going to plug.  I've started my own YouTube channel recently I'm trying to post off.

Peter McCormack: Plug it, yeah.

Roger Ver: I'll post some prison stories on Roger Ver's YouTube channel at some point very soon.

Peter McCormack: Roger Ver's Prison Stories.

Roger Ver: Yeah, including I'll tell a story soon about literally being tortured by prison guards.

Peter McCormack: Yourself?

Roger Ver: Myself personally, yeah.  I'll tell that story soon.  I've lots of good, as in interesting, prison stories.

Peter McCormack: Fuck.  I think we've found a natural conclusion.  I know you've spared me two hours, but I think it's been a very good interview.  It's been great to meet you and talk to you in person.

Roger Ver: I've enjoyed it too, thank you.

Peter McCormack: I'd like to do it again in the future, find out more about the project that's ongoing.  Yeah, is there anything you want to leave, any final notes, any final comments?

Roger Ver: Yeah, if you're not sure on this whole debate between Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Cash, try using both and then decide for yourself which one is more useful.  We have a great tool over at www.free.bitcoin.com.  We'll give anyone in the world about 15 cents' worth of Bitcoin Cash for free if you go to www.free.bitcoin.com

Peter McCormack: Fifteen cents?

Roger Ver: 0.0001 Bitcoin Cash, so that by the time we put this online it'll be something other than 15 cents.  It was about 10 cents when we started.

Peter McCormack: Great to meet you.

Roger Ver: My pleasure, thank you.