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Roger Ver

Roger Ver21 posts

Roger Ver is an entrepreneur and Bitcoin investor and evangelist, born in San Jose, California. After becoming interested in libertarianism at an early age, he stood unsuccessfully as a California libertarian candidate. After college, he started a successful business, memorydealers.com, to sell used computer parts online. After he served 10 months in jail for selling firecrackers online, he moved to Japan. He became interested in Bitcoin when the price was very low and became very wealthy as the price and interest in the virtual currency rose. His investments and evangelism have given him the name “Bitcoin Jesus”. He gave up his US citizenship in 2014 and is now a citizen of St. Kitts.

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1979

Roger Ver born in Silicon Valley

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Roger Ver is born and raised in Silicon Valley. He attends Valley Christian High School in San Jose.

In junior high he finds a copy of  Socialism by Ludwig von Mises, thinking it to be a pro-socialism book. This spurs an interest in libertarianism and through high school he reads economics books by authors like Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, Fredric Bastiat, Leonard Reed, Henry Hazlitt and Friedrich Hayek:

The more I read the more I realized how government control and regulation is making the world a poor place. I learnt that if something’s worth doing, then you don’t need the government forcing people to do it because they will do it on their own.

He is particularly influenced by the writing of Murray Rothbard:

I devoured all of Rothbard’s books and was persuaded by the logic of his arguments. I remember being almost afraid to read such powerful truths. In all my years of schooling, no one before Rothbard had ever pointed out that taxation is the moral equivalent of theft, and the military draft is the moral equivalent of kidnapping and slavery. It shattered my remaining hopes that the State could be morally justified. For the first time I saw them for the criminal band of thieves, slave masters, and murderers that they are. My life has never been the same since.

2005

Moves to Japan

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On the day his probation ends, Ver moves to Japan.

I didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t hurt anybody. I had nothing but happy customers and the U.S. government locked me in a cage because of that. So I want nothing to do with those people. I don’t want to support them. I want them out of my life.

7 Jul, 2014

Retweet donation raises over $150K

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Ver creates a donation program for Ulbright’s legal fund:

I’ll give $10 to @Free_Ross for each RT. If guilty, he’s a hero. If innocent, he needs help.http://freeross.org/

The post quickly receives over 15,000 retweets, or around $150,000, which Ver pledges will be give to the Free Ross Ulbright campaign. In a statement to Coin Telegraph:

I think that each individual owns their own body, and has the absolute right to put whatever they want into it.  The police, judges, and jail guards who lock people in cages for ingesting  substances without the permission of strangers, are the ones committing evil and need to stop. If Ross Ulbricht  is DPR and helped facilitate the these voluntary interactions,  he is a hero for helping provide the technology that allowed peaceful people to ignore the violent threats from strangers calling themselves politicians and law enforcement. If Ross is falsely accused,  and was not DPR,  then he deserves the best defense money can buy. Either way,  he deserves the support of anyone who is opposed to the war on drugs.