Roger Ver is one of the most prominent, influential and successful entrepreneurs and Bitcoin evangelists, often referred to as ‘Bitcoin Jesus’ among supporters of the digital coin.
In his book, Hijacking Bitcoin, he explains how a “temporary hack” became the ultimate weapon in the hands of a small minority, eventually leading to Bitcoin’s capture.
A month ago, Roger granted me permission to use excerpts from his book, despite being in a difficult position in Spain, where he is awaiting extradition to the US on charges of tax evasion related to his Bitcoin possessions.
My latest video featuring experts from Roger Ver and Steve Patterson’s influential book, Hijacking Bitcoin, is now available on YouTube! I’ve also included some personal notes in the accompanying Medium story with additional context and insights.
In this story, the hidden truth of Bitcoin unfolds.
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By 2017, Bitcoin was on course to redefine the future of money, but the old financial powers fought back with everything they had.
And in that war… humanity’s greatest chance was lost.
2017, marks the year that Bitcoin entered the mainstream.
It was the year I joined Bitcoin when it touched $1000 for the first time after four years.
It is also when years-long attempts to hijack the project succeeded.
In 2017, Bitcoin failed as money, and our new overlords established their dominance, promoting a narrative far from what Bitcoin represented until that moment.
No longer was Bitcoin a means of exchange empowering individuals around the world.
The value proposition, the original premise, had fundamentally changed.
Millions of people entered Bitcoin in 2017, and they were trying to understand what exactly was going on.
They recognized that Bitcoin was revolutionizing money and understood its disruptive potential.
Yet, everyone was puzzled as fees skyrocketed to $50 by December that year.
Was this truly the money of the future?
I vividly remember my own journey in 2017, trying to make sense of the chaos.
In November 2017 (after the cancelation of SegWit 2X), I stumbled upon a video featuring a popular Bitcoin spokesperson and developer who was supportive of Blockstream.
His dismissive attitude towards viewers advocating for Bitcoin as a means of exchange, while even singing “Store of Value - Store of Value”, made me realize something was really off.
In the following years, I consistently encountered smears and personal attacks when attempting to discuss Bitcoin’s potential in payments, ultimately realizing the proposed scaling solution, the Lightning Network, was never going to work.
Lightning successfully served as a decoy, an attempt to persuade people to stay with BTC, suggesting scaling via second layers. Big blockers tried to explain why LN wasn’t going to work but the Core-controlled media suppressed the truth.
As a result, people like me, ended up wasting years believing in the viability of the Lightning Network.
The amount of time a newcomer requires to invest to uncover real answers is simply not something the average person can afford.
It takes years to understand that the value proposition has been corrupted.
The battle was never against the Core developers or the tiny 1MB blocks. In an era of 133TB SSD capacities and ever-increasing internet speeds, this fixation on small blocks seems absurd.
Technology was expected to advance, and Satoshi himself explained that by Moore’s law, Bitcoin never reaches a scaling ceiling.
The real winners were not Core but the middlemen, at the expense of everyone else.
The banks, the credit card companies, the countless payment processors and the Central Banks that manipulate the money supply revel in this victory.
The middlemen are the ones who survived and will continue to grab their share of every online transaction.
Cutting out the middlemen is how businesses succeed, making prices more affordable and increasing product quality. In this process, economies are boosted, and quality of life improves. Bitcoin was ushering humanity into a new and better economic era by eliminating these third parties, effectively rendering them obsolete.
Yet, the middlemen will always fight back. And when they consist of the most powerful financial institutions, they already have methods in place to undermine, infiltrate, and “hijack” competition.
In 2017, Bitcoin’s disruptive potential was stifled by a group of individuals who hijacked its development and hindered scalability by refusing to increase the block size.
Their actions indirectly served to maintain the legacy financial system stagnating economies.
This established order may have cut off one head, but many more have emerged since then.
You can find Roger’s book Hijacking Bitcoin here.
Owners of Bitcoin Cash can also buy the book from Bitgree using BCH.
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