Roger Ver is not the enemy of Bitcoin. Indifference, Censorship and Ignorance is.
If you have been in the crypto space for a while, you must have heard the name Roger Ver. A controversial figure, some would say in the space; there is a good chance he is being followed by someone you follow on crypto twitter.
I got into the crypto space in early 2017; I had a little idea of Bitcoin and its underlying tech and pretty much no idea whatsoever when it came to what an online crypto community was. I was a novice. However, within few months of my joining, I got to witness one of the most significant milestone events in Bitcoin’s history- The Infamous Scaling Debate/The Bitcoin Civil War. Like many others, I too hopped on the bandwagon of hating Roger (without doing any due diligence whatsoever). As far as I can remember, he was portrayed as an opportunist, the big bad wolf hell-bent on destroying Bitcoin. The ill-reputation which continues to persist to this date.
One day, I wondered, how come this guy, who is being hated by so many people, is somehow getting followed by a third of people I am following on Twitter? The people who I revere so much…
Eventually, a day came when I decided to hear his side of arguments. So, I started to watch a video where Alex Saunders was interviewing him. When I started watching the interview, his arguments…they made SENSE. Believe me, when I say, I was rooting to find one flaw, one trait that made Roger earn a criminal like reputation in the crypto space. I wanted to find something, anything that I could use to attack Roger, but I COULDN’T.
His arguments were factual, and they made GOD DAMN SENSE!
Suddenly, the Roger who was often demonized by the crypto purists, seemed like a rational person. A man who had legitimate reasoning behind his every statement.
I’m writing this article, with the purpose of catalyzing the broader crypto community to do some introspection about bitcoin within themselves, re-question their faith in the so-called “maximalists,” and to re-evaluate their prejudice against those who hold a different opinion, someone like Roger.
A brief introduction to Roger Ver
Roger is one of the earliest advocates of Bitcoin, popularly known as “Bitcoin Jesus.” He is a staunch supporter of privacy and freedom of speech. Drawing from his past entrepreneurial experiences, he is of the view that government interference in free trade is hindering the pace of economic growth and innovations. When he first discovered Bitcoin, he fell in love with the permissionless, censorship-resistant attributes of it. In 2011, his company, Memorydealers.com, became the first mainstream company to start accepting bitcoin as payment. He then went on to create Bitcoinstore.com, the first website in the world to accept bitcoin as payment for hundreds of thousands of items, and was the impetus for the future wave of merchant adoption. He also became the first person in the entire world to start investing in Bitcoin startups. Nearly singlehandedly, he funded the seed rounds for the entire first generation of Bitcoin businesses- Kraken, Bitpay, and several other blockchain startups like Zcash, Ripple. He has spent nearly a decade of his life evangelizing bitcoin.
How Roger became a villain in the eyes of Crypto Community
In Roger’s own words, he believes he is the victim of the censorship and the propaganda in the bitcoin communities (Reddit, Twitter), which influenced public opinion against him.
During initial scaling debates (~2014), Roger wasn’t much vocal; he was trying to absorb the opinions on both sides of the debate. Though he was of the view to increase the block size, he took time to understand technical arguments against it. The tipping point came when he witnessed banning of people, deletion of the posts supporting on-chain scaling of Bitcoin. He found it paradoxical to trust people with the development of censorship-resistant money who themselves were engaged in censorship.
This was when he got openly vocal and decided to rebel against these purists (those who advocated small blocks) who were suppressing dissent against on-chain scaling. This rebellion was what got him isolated from the Bitcoin community (which he worked so hard to build since 2011). The constant propaganda on Twitter by the small-blockers influenced the public opinion in a way that he became Crypto Twitter Enemy 101 within days of going public with his support behind a bigger block size. He was subjected to online trolling, ridicule and intense verbal profanity (which continues to date).
Why scale Bitcoin? Facts, Figures and Satoshi’s Testaments
Let’s face it; it sucks waiting for an hour to have our transaction finalized on the Bitcoin’s ledger. When networks become congested, why would a miner send your transactions for a sub $1 fee when he can get $10 — $50 for a transaction? Be honest, if you were a business accepting Bitcoin, would you like your customer to pay $50 in transaction fee? Would your customers feel comfortable spending an exorbitant amount of fees?
This is why we needed Bitcoin to scale, Bitcoin as money should flow seamlessly and swiftly whenever a trade is being made. Growing the block size to increase transaction throughput on the Bitcoin blockchain is the need of the hour. Yes, it is a store of value; and indeed, that is one of the great things about it. But it sucks not being able to spend it due to its throughput constraints. This is the ground reality that foundationally affects Bitcoin’s payment ecosystem. Roger pointed this out from a merchant’s point of view. But he was ridiculed for sharing his honesty.
The extent to which scaling bitcoin was important to Roger can be understood from an excerpt from the interview with Alex, where he says, “I literally got on my hands and knees, in a room with all the Chinese miners, and literally begged them to increase the block size.”
Even Satoshi believed 1MB block size was a temporary
“But all 3 us agreed that 1MB had to be temporary because it would never scale”
In a discussion about the Block size on Bitcointalk, Mike Hearn shares an early email he received from Satoshi Nakamoto in response to his question about the block size limit:
The current Segwit implementation batches transactions in the blocks which is tantamount to 2mb blocks, but still, it is far from enough. Legacy nodes being capped at 1mb prevents bitcoin from improving the end-user payment experience.
The Bitcoin Civil War (2017): Arguments for and against increasing the block size for scaling Bitcoin
Arguments against increasing the block size
Increasing the Blocksize would be resource-intensive i.e., it will become more expensive for people to run a full node. If it becomes more costly for people to run a full node, the number of full nodes running on the network might shrink i.e., the decentralization of the Bitcoin network will be affected. Bitcoin might become centralized, and if the nodes become sufficiently less, in order of say, hundreds…Governments can come after the node runners, effectively putting the liveness of the Bitcoin network in jeopardy.
Arguments in favor of increasing block size (Roger’s counterargument):
The way for Bitcoin to become TRULY censorship-resistant is to get more people around the world using it, that is, Bitcoin needs rampant adoption. People should actually use Bitcoin in their day to day commerce. The way to achieve this feat is by providing the end-user with a superfast, cheap, reliable, good user-experience. If we get the people around the world using Bitcoin from 10 million to 100 million to a billion and then to 5 billion people, there is a good chance Bitcoin would have a bigger pool of full nodes to the tune of ~100,000 or even more i.e., it becomes more decentralized and valuable.
A question to the reader: Which argument makes more sense to you?
We did Segwit, did it not scale Bitcoin?
Sure, Segwit was an engineering breakthrough, it was one step in the right direction, but it wasn’t enough, bitcoin needed to scale much MORE.
Segwit2X was a decent proposal. It was the compromise reached by the big blockers and small blockers (popularly known as New York Agreement), it would’ve increased the base block size to 2mb. At one time, it had more than 90% miner consensus. However, it got shelved at the last minute. This was a significant setback in efforts to scale Bitcoin. Some people believed Jeff Garzik wasn’t a very proficient developer (sorry Jeff, nothing personal, just public opinion) and couldn’t trust him leading the charge for Segwit2x, the new Bitcoin. It might be true, but why is that the rest of the core-developers did not join hands to work on Segwit2x? Even after two and a half years, why is that there are no talks to reignite engineering towards Segwit2x?
Evaluating the aftermath of failed scaling
The 2016 Bitcoin civil war took a toll on Bitcoin’s adoption. Businesses that were accepting Bitcoin e.g., Coinbase, Xapo, Bitpay, Purse.io, Bitcoin.com, were all in favor of increasing the block size. According to Roger, it was due to the continued sluggishness in Bitcoin’s transaction speed, “We lost half a decade of adoption.” Many of the businesses with a significant user base, in millions, cut their support to it (Microsoft, Dell Computers, Expedia). Losing access to this user base derailed the growing momentum of Bitcoin’s adoption.
Do you believe Bitcoin will reach mass adoption only by spectacular engineering?
We have some of the best engineering talent working on the Bitcoin protocol. At their heart, I know they all mean well for Bitcoin, but they seem to have deluded themselves into believing that only solid engineering will pave the way for the success of Bitcoin.
This is a big NO!
It is necessary that they formulate a product development strategy by taking note of inputs from a business’ point of view as well. These can only be provided by people who are actually building a business on Bitcoin. People like Roger, Brian Armstrong. The product doesn’t sell itself if there is no one to sell it. (I in no way am advocating corporate takeover, I’m advocating the development of a product which is more consumer-friendly)
Consider this example, Woz loved engineering. He wanted nothing to do with day to day business matters of Apple. His only objective was to build, that is, product engineering.
Now imagine, if there was no Steve Jobs to market Apple, Guy Kawasaki to evangelize Apple products, would the Apple we know today existed? Would we be in possession of any Apple product that we love to use today? Would we have witnessed the smartphone revolution in 2007? Would we have seen the first trillion-dollar company in 2019?
If the computer built by Woz remained in his house, we would’ve missed out on a series of revolutions.
Today, the hard truth is, there is no one evangelizing bitcoin, it’s been reduced to an object of speculation. People have settled with the slow pace of ongoing development.
Making bitcoin spendable is essential because businesses a.k.a trade is the key to the real globalization of Bitcoin.
Some Questions I’d like to ask small blocker community
1. It’s been over a year and a half since I wrote this article on Bitcoin. I typed Schnorr is coming, I mentioned lightning is coming. Yet even after a year and a half, why have we failed to successfully implement these technologies?
2. Why is it that we did not scale Bitcoin with what we had in 2017 i.e., Big Blocks? In hindsight, wouldn’t we be better off today had we increased the blocksize in 2017 given that is ultimately inevitable?
3. Was it worth it to effectively KILL the momentum of Bitcoin’s adoption by forcing the users to settle seven transactions per second on Bitcoin’s blockchain, just because you wanted to keep the block size small?
Closing Thoughts
We need people like Roger in this space to present their unique viewpoints, to re-evangelize Bitcoin. Instead of lambasting them for their thoughts, we should be willing to listen to them with an open mind. Turning deaf ears to someone who has a different opinion than you is effectively censoring yourself from testing your beliefs, that is, your beliefs become absolute, that is, you won’t change your opinion, even if it means settling with something inaccurate. It prevents one from discovering the truth. Uninterrupted exchange of thoughts helps communities like us to become more aware, educated, engaged, and robust. They guide us to a path of self-determination. Differing opinions can help us discover unknown-unknowns that otherwise wouldn’t be possible if we were to orient ourselves with a herd-like mentality (i.e., following your go-to crypto influencer).
Open your mind, ask questions, and invest time in research. Respect the freedom of speech even if you do not concur with someone who holds a different opinion. Don’t be like this guy below!
Some Videos I recommend watching which are definitely worth your time
What The Fork Happened? An Honest Conversation With Roger Ver (MUST WATCH!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suqkIjaBd28
The story of how censorship started on r/bitcoin by an old mod — Jason King | Humans of Bitcoin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAL3y80PA5I
The effects of Censorship and Propaganda upon Bitcoin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caUDXLqpdYc
Roger vs Nouriel Roubini
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kf-sLVSi9M
NOTE: Roger was one of the very few (besides Bobby Lee) who successfully defended Bitcoin against Nouriel Roubini, where the likes of Arthur Hayes, Tone Vays, Brock Pierce failed.
References
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