In his life, Roger Ver has been known for his full-throated support of only two cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin and, later, Bitcoin Cash. His enthusiasm and evangelism for crypto in its earliest days earned him the nickname “Bitcoin Jesus.”
Now he’s touting the merits of Dogecoin.
The revelation came about when Ver came out of social media hibernation on Tuesday to praise Elon Musk’s bid to buy Twitter. Before that, the Bitcoin OG hadn’t tweeted for a year.
In a subsequent interview with Bloomberg, Ver revealed that he shared Musk’s appreciation of DOGE.
“It’s cheaper and more reliable,” Ver said. “If I had to pick three contenders [for the world’s dominant cryptocurrency], they would be DOGE, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash.”
Musk has been tweeting about Dogecoin for years and has even gone so far as to work behind the scenes with the blockchain’s developers to tweak DOGE’s code and help make it an ideal currency for transactions—something both he and Ver think Bitcoin isn’t designed for.
Ver began investing in Bitcoin in 2011 when it was trading at around $1. In 2014, he took possession of the Bitcoin.com domain and began using it to educate the public about Bitcoin.
But a contentious hard fork in 2017 saw the network fork into two blockchains—Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, the latter of which has low fees and lower congestion so that it can be used for transactions. Ver, who had pushed for larger block sizes to increase the number of transactions the network could process, became the most prominent supporter of Bitcoin Cash.
He abandoned BTC, rededicating Bitcoin.com to Bitcoin Cash.
But Ver still retains that old libertarian ethos that drew him to Bitcoin and un-censorable money in the first place. Speaking of Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, Ver said, “It’ll certainly make Twitter more attractive. I am really, really grateful that Musk is out there calling out censorship.”
And, by the sounds of it, he’d be all in favor of Musk enabling Dogecoin Tips. That might even get him tweeting more than once a year.
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