As some of you might know, Roger Ver is one of the first to have invested in Bitcoin startups and has openly acknowledged that he has purchased BTC at a price of $1.
There is a great 20 questions interview with him made by our very own Steemian @wadepaterson if you want to read more.
I wanted to drop a few words from my own perspective and how much I know about this scenario. I came to learn about Roger Ver in early 2014. You could tell he was very passionate about bitcoin and blockchain technology and never a person to dismiss altcoins just because they were different. In my opinion he always saw the greater good of the tech and didn't just want Bitcoin to be the one to succeed for mass adoption, he wanted the whole technology to become wide-spread and to make a change in this world.
There are a lot of people nowadays dismissing him as just being "lucky to hear about bitcoin early" and a fool when it comes to other aspects. Many say that he dismisses Bitcoin and its development for his own agenda, but I don't believe that's really the deal here since much what he talks about is something I have noticed myself happening time after time again.
and that's censorship on the r/bitcoin subreddit.
At first people were denying much of the censorship and since actions are not public on Reddit no one really knew what was actually happening. If moderators were really silencing people that had concern or were questioning the development of Bitcoin or if it was just normal users acting that way.
I do remember the day when they completely removed showing the karma score of comments in all of their posts, that was the first big red flag in my opinion about freedom of speech and manipulation of discussion in that subreddit. I'm not sure exactly for how long it doesn't show the karma points, usually 12 h after they show up but that leaves a lot of leeway to manipulate discussion into what they themselves want them to be like. What this means is that they could be using masses of bots to downvote criticism and upvote comments and posts that talk positively about them without users noticing it as much since the scores are hidden. This is what a post on that subreddit looks like nowadays.
Roger had enough of this and created another subreddit instead called r/btc. I am not 100% sure if this happened before or after they decided not to show karma points on comments but it was one of many steps to divide the bitcoin community along with the Bitcoin.com forum and now the fork that occurred recently and after all this questionable activity he had all rights to divide it.
Many people criticize Roger because of this but in my honest opinion I believe if anyone was to do it he was the right person to and I wish him good luck with Bitcoin Cash. Due to much of this censorship going on on the r/bitcoin subreddits and bitcointalk forums it was a big reason to me getting uninterested of the currency and giving up on its scaling development. This was also a big reason why I started researching Ethereum more instead and when I heard about Steemit it felt like a big puzzle had just been put together fixing all issues about censorship and manipulation that were making this a rabbit hole of information. Even today they keep censoring people for as much as bringing up alternative solutions in discussions on the subreddit and even shadowdeleting my comments.
As you can see someone mentioned ChainBB which is a Forum front-end for Steem created by @jesta and after his ignorant comment I had replied with this which is now only visible by me (because of the shadow-delete).
I mean, I really can't even understand how he thinks deleting these comments does them any good considering how everyone has started to learn lately how much that whole subreddit keeps getting censored and probably a lot more shady stuff happening behind the scenes that we can't know of because none of those actions are public like they are here on the blockchain.
This is why we need to get more people to use Steemit, not just for earning but for having debates and discussions that cannot be censored, thus giving everyone the freedom of speech and letting the readers decide for themselves.
It is great to see that Roger Ver has already been using Steemit although with not much activity, you can check out his profile under the username @rogerkver.
Now, what really inspired me to write this post today and share my point of view into the matter is this video I stumbled upon today. First check out this video where Roger passionately talks about the potential of Bitcoin and Blockchain technology in general, a snip from a documentary called "The Bitcoin Gospel" which I highly recommend everyone to watch, you can it find under this link.
This was of course a bit unrelated to the question in the video that I'm going to link next but I feel its important to understand the difference between these key people. Many say Roger does it for his own agenda but its public that he has already been very wealthy in his private life even before he stumbled upon Bitcoin as you can read on the @wadepeterson interview linked in the beginning of the post.
Now compare that with this video that I uploaded onto my youtube channel cause the vid.me link it was uploaded to can't be embedded on Steemit yet. This is Luke-Jr, Core Developer at Blockstream, the company in charge of Bitcoins development and the same user who has censored mine and many others comments and posts on r/bitcoin in the past.
(If you are interested to watch a longer interview with Roger Ver by the same interviewer as in the video above, here is a link to it.)
I am as speechless at his response as he seems to be in the interview.
So who would you trust with the future of the biggest crypto-currency and its development?
I want to end this blogpost by acknowledging that there might be many pieces of the puzzle missing as I haven't actively read up on r/bitcoin (with good reasons to it) over the past couple years and I mostly read on r/btc instead and will probably invest in Bitcoin Cash rather than Bitcoin. This is also why I'm tagging this into "blog" as its more of personal belief and just urging users not to believe anything they read on media sites that are easily manipulated and controlled.
I recently also wrote a post about vote-buying on Reddit and how anyone with a small investment can often cheat their way to making their content go viral on the platform, this has probably even bigger effects on smaller subreddits which not many of the Reddit moderators fighting this may be aware of.
Stay safe with your crypto investments and don't put all eggs in one basket!