Who is Roger Keith Ver? What Wikipedia Won't Tell You

Roger Ver made headlines in June after CoinFLEX CEO Mark Lamb alleged he had defaulted on a $47 million loan from the exchange, leading it to the brink of insolvency and prompting it to freeze customer withdrawals. Public details about the 43-year-old investor are scarce, so here’s a little of what we know. (Read to the end for some drama straight from Wikipedia’s annals.)

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Who is Roger Ver?

Ver was born in 1979 in San Jose, California. While there is a dearth of information about Ver in media, he has spoken extensively about his life in YouTube videos. He revealed in one that he moved out of his parents’ house when he was 16 after a dispute with his father involving a Ford Mustang. Ver purchased the car, but his father disapproved and attempted to sell it. Ver called the police, who threatened to arrest his father if he sold Ver’s property.

He subsequently attended De Anza Community College in Cupertino for a year before dropping out to pursue his entrepreneurial interests. In 1998, at the age of 19, he began buying and selling items on eBay. Those items included hard drives from bankrupt companies, as well as firecrackers, which he discovered he could purchase and resell at a profit.

Why did Roger Ver go to Jail?

Reselling firecrackers led to Ver’s run-in with California authorities. In 2002, at the age of 22, Ver accepted a plea deal on charges that included dealing in explosives without a license; illegally storing explosives; and “mailing injurious articles.”

The case against him was led by then-U.S. Attorney Robert Mueller. Mueller said in charging documents that Ver stored 49 pounds of firecrackers — and sold 14 pounds — between Dec. 1, 1998, and Dec. 14, 2000. Ver said the product in question was “Pest Control Report 2000,” a firecracker typically used for scaring away birds.

“It’s worth pointing out that the criminal act isn’t the selling of explosives — it’s the doing it without a license,” Ver said in a 2018 YouTube video. “It’s simply just not getting a permission slip to sell the firecrackers.”

“A bunch of other resellers on eBay” sold the same product, he noted. “People all over the country were selling it. The manufacturer manufactured over a million of the units. I sold a few thousand of them. The manufacturer basically was just told to stop selling them. Nobody had to pay a fine or go to jail except for me, because I spoke truth to power.”

Ver — who ran for the California state Senate as a Libertarian in 2000 — said examples of his comments included referencing the draft as “the moral equivalent of kidnapping and slavery,” and calling war “mass murder funded by theft.'”

He also said prosecutors pressured him to take the plea deal for a 10-month prison sentence or face a possible maximum sentence of eight years. In his YouTube video, titled, “My Story of Being Tortured in Prison,” he said he made the “mistake of choosing to start my prison sentence on a Friday.”

“Don’t ever start your prison sentence on a Friday,” he said. “And certainly don’t do it on the Friday before a national holiday. I think it was right before Memorial Day or Labor Day or something like that.”

He added:

I showed up at federal prison there. They were waiting to classify me. So when they haven’t classified you yet, they send you to the highest security level they have within the prison. It’s called the SHU, which stands for special housing unit. Which is just a euphemism for a jail within a jail … a little, little tiny room with six bunk beds. Six people total, and a toilet and a shower with no privacy or door or anything at all around the toilet or the shower. … And so little ventilation that everyone just basically strips down to their underwear.

…

My attorney representing me, the prosecuting U.S. attorney, the judge, everybody assured me that I would be going to what’s called a federal prison camp, where there’d just be a line on the ground you’re not supposed to go past. And they assured me that it would be just like going to summer camp — that you’ll be there with a bunch of doctors, lawyers and drug dealers. And as a kid, I loved summer camp, and so I didn’t really believe that it would be just like summer camp.

But I didn’t think I [would] be locked in a little tiny cell 24 hours a day for four or five days straight with five other people that I didn’t know at all and absolutely no privacy for the restroom at all.

“I think it was on Wednesday that they finally got around to classifying where I would go in the jail.

Ver revealed in a 2021 interview that he briefly contemplated killing himself over the ordeal — and hoping a cryonics company would resurrect him in the future. “I even considered — suicide isn’t the right word — but I considered killing myself temporarily,” Ver said. “Going into cryonic suspension and then coming out later, when the technology is better. To avoid going to prison. That’s how upset I was about going to jail.”

He nonetheless completed his 10-month sentence at the Lompoc Federal Penitentiary in Santa Barbara, California. While he was there, Ver said, he taught himself Japanese. He completed post-prison probation in 2006.

What Businesses Did Roger Ver Invest In?

Ver founded his first company, MemoryDealers, in 1999. He sold it in 2012, a year after he began investing in bitcoin. He quickly started making headlines for his bitcoin advocacy, including in 2013, when he donated 1,000 bitcoin to the Foundation for Economic Education — valued then at a little more than $100,000 — because, he said, he lost a bet that bitcoin would outperform “gold, silver, the U.S. stock market, and the U.S. dollar by more than a hundred times” in two years. In reality, he noted, it took two-and-a-half years.

He purchased Bitcoin.com in 2014 and served as its CEO for several years before becoming its executive chairman. Over the same period, he invested in numerous crypto-related projects and companies. Some of those included Ripple (XRP), Bitpay, CoinFLEX, and Kraken. And he served or has served as an advisor to OmniSparx, Pangea Blockchain Fund, the Naga Group, MGT Capital Investments, and Monarch Wallet.

Why is Roger Ver Called ‘Bitcoin Jesus’?

Pundits commonly refer to Ver as “Bitcoin Jesus.” Explaining the moniker in a 2013 interview with CNBC, he said, “I believe Peter Vessenes [chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation] gave me the title when we were at a BBQ together. I was explaining bitcoin to about two dozen high school kids. The kids were all enthralled by bitcoin and hanging on my every word. Peter then commented that ‘it’s like you are a Bitcoin Jesus, and you have all your disciples around you.'”

Where Does Roger Ver Live?

He moved to Japan in 2006. However, he won citizenship in the Caribbean nation of St. Kitts and Nevis — a member of the British commonwealth — and renounced his U.S. citizenship in February 2014. In a 2021 interview with a blog for an immigration law firm, he expounded on the virtues of his new country.

“Saint Kitts gave me visa-free travel to almost all of Europe, all of South America, and almost all of Asia without any visa required,” he said. Calling it a “fantastic passport,” he added, “You have no personal, corporate income, or capital gains tax. You don’t need even to file a tax return at the end of the year.”

What’s Roger Ver’s Net Worth?

It’s hard to come by public data on Ver’s net worth. Numerous sources suggest — without evidence — that it stood above $500 million before prices crashed in 2022. In a 2019 interview with Ver, Forbes placed the value of his bitcoin holdings at a figure slightly north of $179 million. As of June 2022, after defaulting on the $47 million CoinFLEX loan, it wasn’t clear how much Ver’s surviving assets were worth.

What Wikipedia Doesn’t Tell You About Roger Ver

Wikipedia editors have battled on the “Talk” section of Ver’s Wikipedia page — where they debate outside public view — for years. From time to time, Ver joins them.

One 2015 incident took place after U.S. officials refused to allow Ver entry to speak at a bitcoin conference in Miami. Wikipedians claimed it was because “he lacked close enough ties to his new country … causing fears he might become an illegal immigrant.”

“Renouncing U.S. citizenship means giving up the right to enter the U.S.,” one editor said. “Entry as a visitor may be allowed, but the State Department doesn’t have to allow it.”

Ver shot back:

This is completely inaccurate. I was denied a visa according to the embassy because I hadn’t shown ties outside of the USA to ANY country that would motivate me to leave the USA at the end of my trip. The law doesn’t require that the ties be to any specific country, including the country of citizenship. The embassy workers had the audacity to do this while refusing to even look at the evidence provided. (They disallowed me from even sliding my evidence through the interview slot for them to review.) Subsequently, my visa was approved on the first try at the U.S. embassy in Tokyo. (Source for all this is me, Roger Ver.)

In another debate, editors squabbled over the nature of Ver’s firecrackers. “One man’s firecracker is another man’s explosives,” an editor wrote.

Ver critic John Nagle disagreed, writing, “49 pounds of black powder firecrackers puts you into serious explosive territory.”

Editors failed to reach a resolution. As of 2022, Ver’s front-facing Wikipedia page told users he “pleaded guilty to selling explosives, or fireworks, without a license.”