Roger Keith Ver is an investor, entrepreneur, and one of the earliest promoters of Bitcoin.
Ver was sometimes referred to as “Bitcoin Jesus” for his extreme devotion to Bitcoins.
In this article, we will look at the life and career of the man who was a Bitcoin Mogul, a Crypto investor, and an Entrepreneur.
Roger Ver – Early Life
Roger Ver was born in the year 1979 in San Jose, California. He was enrolled at the Valley Christian High School and then went on to study at the De Anza College for one year before dropping out to pursue his interests in business.
In his earlier years, Ver took up an interest in politics and ran for the California State Assembly for the Libertarian Party and accused the Drug Enforcement Administration of being criminal in its practice at one of the debates running up to his election.
Ver was the founder and CEO of the company MemoryDealers.com which operated by its sale of memory equipment, transceivers, and other accessories of similar nature.
A lesser-known part of his life was the time he spent in Japan after he moved there in 2005 but it has been rumored that he had a lot of influence on the Bitcoin enthusiast Mai Fujimoto (nicknamed “Miss Bitcoin”) in convincing her to take up the job to become a proponent for Bitcoin and the technology associated with it.
Now that we have looked at a few details from his earlier personal and professional life let us start looking at Ver’s involvement with Bitcoins and his career as a Crypto Angel Investor.
Roger Ver And Bitcoins
From the publicly available data, it is stated that Ver began investing in Bitcoin in early 2011 when the price of a single Bitcoin was still just one U.S. Dollar.
His initial investment in a Bitcoin venture started with his investment of $125,000 in Bitinstant, a firm that facilitated the transfer of funds between and into Bitcoin exchanges with support from various payment methods.
He later went on to be known as an Angel investor and invested over a million dollars into other Bitcoin-related ventures such as Ripple, Blockchain.com, BitPay, and Kraken.
His company Memorydealers in 2011, became one of the first companies to accept Bitcoin as a payment method.
Ver has set up several Bitcoin meetups over the years and was one of the first five founders of the Bitcoin Foundation.
Ver has always promoted Bitcoin as a way to achieve financial freedom and hopes to see Bitcoin rival fiat currencies.
In his further journey as a Bitcoin enthusiast, Ver has been a major proponent of a number of changes in the Bitcoin ecosystem such as his support for the introduction of a larger block size for the Bitcoin blockchain as well as his support for the hard fork method of Bitcoin XT.
Ver was the CEO of the company managing the website Bitcoin.com up until 1 August 2019 before he made his transition to become the company’s executive chairman.
He was also one of the shareholders in the centralized crypto exchange platform CoinFLEX which later faced many problems due to the debt accumulated by it later paused withdrawals after facing liquidity issues.
It seems that his personal Life is as interesting and eventful as his professional life. Let us have a look at a few of his personal views and interests in the section below.
Roger Ver – Personal Life And Opinions
Ver has described himself as a libertarian, anarcho-capitalist, voluntaryist, a peach advocate, and an advocate for individualism.
He went on to become a citizen of the Caribbean island nation of Saint Kitts and Nevis after renouncing his United States citizenship in 2014. He has in numerous other instances been denied a visa by the U.S. and other countries due to his continuous movement from one country to the other.
Apart from this Ver has been seen competing in various Brazillian Jiu-Jitsu world championships and has described it as one of his major passions in life.
In the next section let us look at a few of the accusations and legal hurdles he had to overcome throughout his way.
Legal Hurdles
Ver has not been a stranger to legal authorities and enforcement agencies over his life.
One of his early instances of locking horns with the law was in 2002 when he had to plead guilty to selling explosives without a license. He later ended up being sentenced to 10 months in federal prison for the same crime.
Further major charges that were brought up against Ver apart from this included his indictment in April 2024 for charges of income tax evasion from the U.S.
Final Thoughts
Looking at the details of his personal and professional life it is of no mystery why Roger was called the Bitcoin Jesus. Among the other individuals who were involved in his field, his leadership qualities and the path he set forward should give him an honorable mention in every conversation involving Bitcoins.
The highly eventful and chaotic life of Roger Ver has an interesting quality to it and his relentless pursuit of the realization of his passion is something that should be admired on its own.
