Original author: THEJASWINI MA
Original translation: Saoirse, Foresight News
Roger Ver is penniless.
But this is not bankruptcy as the world understands it. He still holds enough Bitcoin to buy a small country. However, when he is in a Spanish prison, facing a heavy sentence of 109 years in the United States, burdened with rising legal fees and with nowhere to go, this kind of bankruptcy is fatal.
On July 4, 2025, someone moved 80,000 bitcoins worth $8.72 billion from eight wallets that had been dormant since 2011. The transfers were so orderly and methodical, as if someone was following a checklist. Within hours, crypto Twitter users concluded that Roger Ver was liquidating his long-hoarded bitcoins in exchange for his freedom.
The inference is logical: Roger Ver has the motivation, ability, and technical knowledge to manipulate early Bitcoin wallets. His legal troubles are intensifying, and his extradition hearing is imminent, and his public request for a presidential pardon has outlined the image of a desperate person.
But no one can verify the wallets’ connection to him, and they have never been linked to any known address of Roger Ver. The funds could belong to any of the early Bitcoin holders who may have finally decided to cash out when the price of Bitcoin hit six figures.
Roger Ver’s legal predicament is clear. The man once known as “Bitcoin Jesus” has long since fallen from the altar of preacher. Overnight, he went from a cryptocurrency enthusiast to a cautionary tale of taxation and hubris. His arrest in Spain made the cryptocurrency community realize how easily their digital revolution could be dismantled by the traditional legal system.
His experience as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, cryptocurrency evangelist and federal fugitive reveals a paradox: The financial freedom promised by Bitcoin ended up being entangled with the system it was meant to replace.
Silicon Valley Origins
Looking back, one might say that Roger Ver was born at the right time, in the right place and with the right people.
He was born in San Jose on January 27, 1979. His father made a living repairing computers, which meant that Roger Ver grew up around the machines that would connect the world and thus understand how networks work.
Roger Ver strayed from the traditional path early on. He attended De Anza College from 1997 to 1999, majoring in economics, math, and astronomy, and took a minor in physics at Stanford University. During that time, he founded MemoryDealers.com, reselling Cisco networking equipment, memory, and accessories during the dot-com bubble, when demand for such hardware was skyrocketing.
During the dot-com bubble, everyone was snapping up servers, routers, memory chips, and anything that could speed up data transfer. Roger Ver not only got wholesale prices, but also had a group of customers willing to pay retail prices in exchange for instant delivery. After two years, he dropped out of school to focus on running the company full-time. In his decade as CEO, he saw the customer base expand from Bay Area startups to Fortune 500 companies.
In 2004, he founded Agilestar.com, focusing on fiber optic transceivers. These components are key to achieving high-speed Internet. The companys business covers almost all countries in the world, making Roger Ver a person with both technical insight and global business vision.
In the process, Roger Ver gradually formed his own worldview. He believes in the philosophy of libertarianism and agrees with the idea that individuals should control their own wealth, data and lives. In 2000, he ran for the California State Assembly as a Libertarian Party candidate. Although he did not receive a high vote share, he established his firm belief that technology will make the government ineffective.
Explosives incidents
In 2002, federal agents arrested Roger Ver for selling explosives on eBay.
Between January 1999 and August 2000, Roger Ver purchased 49 pounds of an explosive device called Pest Control Report 2000 from a supplier in South Carolina and sold at least 14 pounds to online bidders. However, he did not have a license to handle or sell such materials. Multiple violations followed: Roger Ver stored explosives in an apartment building and transported them through the U.S. Postal System without obtaining the necessary permits.
On May 2, 2002, Roger Ver was sentenced to 10 months in federal prison, a $2,000 fine, and three years of supervised release. This experience completely changed him. He felt the majesty of federal law enforcement firsthand and had a different view of government authority. Sitting in the cell, he realized for the first time the influence of federal power.
Bitcoin Revelation
In 2011, Roger Ver discovered Bitcoin.
He studied the white paper and saw a monetary system that didn’t require central bank or government regulation. For someone who had served 10 months in federal prison, the appeal was obvious.
Roger Ver began accepting Bitcoin payments at MemoryDealers when the price of Bitcoin was below $1 per unit, making the company one of the first businesses to treat Bitcoin as a real currency rather than a novelty.
Bitcoin is a fascinating technology, but it will require exchanges, wallets, payment processors, and educational resources to grow beyond crypto enthusiasts.
Roger Ver began investing in bitcoin startups. He provided early funding for BitInstant, one of the first bitcoin exchanges, invested in Kraken, which later became a trading platform, and funded companies such as Blockchain.com, Ripple, BitPay, and Purse.io, which do the actual work of circulating bitcoin.
In 2012, Roger Ver launched Bitcoinstore.com to sell electronic products with Bitcoin, and also founded Bitcoin.com, which later became a well-known cryptocurrency education platform.
Roger Ver knows that only those who control the infrastructure can control the process of popularization. He puts himself at the core of the Bitcoin ecosystem, not only as an investor, but also as a key figure that other entrepreneurs need to cooperate with.
Roger Ver systematically accumulated Bitcoin. By 2014, he and his company held about 131,000 Bitcoins (58,000 personally, MemoryDealers and Agilestar held 73,000), and the final total holdings were estimated to be more than 400,000. In 2014, when the price of Bitcoin was about $871, his assets were worth more than $100 million.
In addition to collecting Bitcoin, Roger Ver has spared no effort to promote it: speaking at conferences, accepting media interviews, funding educational projects, and using his growing platform to advocate for the popularization of Bitcoin. The community began to call him Bitcoin Jesus.
The nickname is very appropriate. He promotes the craze of Bitcoin as if he believes that he is providing financial salvation for a world controlled by the governments monetary system. In his eyes, Bitcoin has long gone beyond the scope of technology and has become the embodiment of ideology.
Fatal Decision
On February 4, 2014, Roger Ver purchased citizenship of St. Kitts and Nevis for $150,000 and renounced his U.S. citizenship. This move made financial sense: as a Caribbean citizen, he was able to avoid U.S. tax obligations on global income and gain visa-free access to more than 130 countries. For him, who sees governments as predators, this decision is completely in line with his philosophy.
However, renouncing US citizenship triggers an exit tax obligation. When US citizens renounce their citizenship, they must declare capital gains on their global assets and pay the corresponding taxes. Roger Ver was required to declare his Bitcoin holdings and pay taxes on the increase in value, but he failed to properly fulfill his obligations, which almost completely changed the trajectory of his life.
Camp split
In 2017, Bitcoin faced a thorny problem: the surge in the number of users resulted in a limited number of transactions that the network could process per block, causing congestion and soaring transaction fees.
The community is divided over solutions. One side wants to process more transactions by expanding block capacity, while the other side prefers off-chain solutions such as the Lightning Network. The technical trade-offs are crucial: larger blocks can increase transaction processing, but they will also increase the hardware requirements of miners, which may lead to the elimination of small miners due to high costs, thereby reducing the decentralization of Bitcoin; while off-chain solutions can maintain decentralization, they will increase system complexity and require additional infrastructure support.
Roger Ver supports increasing block capacity, insisting that this is in line with Satoshi Nakamotos original intention of using Bitcoin as digital cash.
In August 2017, the expansion dispute ended with a fork, giving birth to a new cryptocurrency Bitcoin Cash with a larger block size. Roger Ver became its main advocate and invested all his resources in its promotion. He also adjusted the content bias of Bitcoin.com, supporting Bitcoin Cash and ignoring Bitcoin, and was accused by critics of using the platform to mislead newcomers to buy the wrong cryptocurrency.
The decision proved to be a costly one, as Bitcoin’s market value and popularity continued to rise, while Bitcoin Cash gradually lost market share. In a critical divide in the development of cryptocurrency, Roger Ver was on the wrong side of the fence.
The Reckoning of Fate
On February 15, 2024, a federal grand jury indicted Roger Ver on eight counts: three counts of mail fraud, two counts of tax evasion, and three counts of filing a false tax return.
The core of the charges revolves around his renunciation of U.S. citizenship in 2014. According to the Department of Justice, Roger Ver provided false information to law firms and asset appraisers, concealing the actual number of Bitcoins held by himself and his company, causing tax returns to seriously underestimate the value of assets and failing to report personal Bitcoin assets.
The indictment also pointed out that in November 2017, Roger Ver sold tens of thousands of bitcoins and cashed in about $240 million, but deliberately concealed the transaction facts from the accountant and did not declare capital gains. The government said his actions caused the IRS to lose at least $48 million. In April 2024, Roger Ver was arrested in Spain and after paying a $160,000 bail, he is still waiting for the Spanish authorities to decide whether to extradite him to the United States. If all charges are convicted, he will face up to 109 years in prison.
Roger Ver, who is in prison, publicly asked President Trump for a pardon: Mr. President, I am an American and I need your help. Only if you uphold justice can you save me.
Even the entire industry is supporting him:
Vitalik: Life imprisonment for non-violent tax violations is absurd. The case against Roger Ver is clearly politically motivated — just like Ross Ulbricht’s, there are too many people and companies accused of far more serious crimes who face far less severe sentences than Roger Ver. There is a persuasive argument that he was targeted because of what he has said (i.e., his advocacy for freedom and his refusal to recognize the legitimacy of coercive state power). This is worth speaking out against, as it is a common practice to circumvent protections such as those provided by the First Amendment by selectively prosecuting unrelated crimes (and in more authoritarian countries, even bypassing the most basic moral basis of not punishing an individual for the crimes of his family). The US system of “citizenship-based taxation” and its associated tax refunds are extremely harsh: the former is rarely used by other countries, and the latter is also taxed at some of the highest rates in the world (e.g., the UK only taxes capital gains on funds repatriated within 5 years). If the IRS did intimidate Roger Ver’s attorney to obtain confidential information, it would be a complete breach of trust. The right to confidential consultation with an attorney must be respected. Inadvertent errors should be handled by giving the individual the opportunity to pay the back taxes (if necessary) with interest and penalties, rather than filing a lawsuit.
But Roger Vers decision to renounce his U.S. citizenship in 2014 planted a hidden danger. When asked whether he supported pardoning Roger Ver, Elon Musk responded on social media: Roger Ver voluntarily renounced his U.S. citizenship and should not be pardoned. Citizenship itself comes with rights.
This man who abandoned his nationality to escape government control now finds that only American citizenship can provide him with government protection, and he is caught in a classic Catch-22 paradox. (Note: Catch-22 comes from the 1961 novel of the same name by American writer Joseph Heller, Catch-22, which describes a paradoxical dilemma. Its core meaning is: when you are trapped in a self-contradictory rule system, no matter what choice you make, you cannot get out of the dilemma, because the rules themselves constitute an endless loop.)
This brings us back to July 4, 2025, when eight mysterious wallets suddenly moved $8.72 billion in Bitcoin. Crypto analysts immediately linked the transaction to Roger Ver’s legal woes, with some Twitter users speculating that he might be liquidating assets to pay off huge legal fees or reach a settlement with the IRS.
For Roger Ver, who is desperate, selling the bitcoins he held earlier to support his defense costs or even negotiating a guilty plea with the prosecutor seems to be the only rational option. However, the crypto communitys speculation has always remained on indirect evidence and time coincidences, and the truth is still shrouded in mystery.
The Fallen Prophet
Today, Roger Ver has a net worth of about $700 million, mainly from early Bitcoin investments and crypto company holdings. But wealth cannot solve his real dilemma: as a stateless person, he faces extradition to a country where he voluntarily gave up his citizenship for trial.
His story is both a microcosm of the early glory of cryptocurrency - laying the foundation for the digital asset ecosystem with a keen insight into the potential of Bitcoin and strategic investment in infrastructure; exposing millions of new people to cryptocurrency through evangelical promotion and educational programs - and reveals the dangers of the collision between idealism and real-world rules.
This man who foresaw the future of Bitcoin failed to see through the price of his choice: selling explosives without a license, giving up his nationality to evade taxes, and supporting Bitcoin Cash and going against the mainstream... Ultimately, he destroyed his own destiny.
Whether he was behind the July 4 bitcoin move remains an unsolved mystery, but one thing is certain: those transactions were just like Roger Ver’s former incarnation, mobilizing billions of dollars of power at the touch of a button, freedom outside the traditional financial system, and the ultimate liberation that cryptocurrency promised to the first generation of believers.
But for Roger Ver, this freedom has long since turned into a cage he built with his own hands.
