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BTC
From: This is the book that had to be written. It is a story of a missed opportunity to change the world, a tragic tale of subversion and betrayal. But it is also a hopeful story of efforts we can make to ensure that the hijacking of Bitcoin is not the final chapter. There is still the chance for this great innovation to liberate the world but the path from here to there turns out to be more circuitous than any of us ever imagined.
Roger Ver does not blow his own trumpet in this book, but he truly is a hero of this saga, not only deeply knowledgeable of the technologies but also a man who has clung to an emancipatory vision of Bitcoin from the earliest days through the present. I share his commitment to the idea of peer-to-peer currency for the masses, alongside a competitive marketplace for free-enterprise monies. This is a hugely important documentary history, and the polemic alone will challenge anyone who believes himself to be on the other side. Regardless, this book had to exist, however painful. It’s a gift to the world.
Jeffrey Tucker
President, Brownstone Institute
Introduction
The past thirteen years of my life have been spent trying to make Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies the money of the future. The technology has the potential to make the world a radically freer and more prosperous place, and it will end up being one of the most important inventions of all time. I have spent more than a decade evangelizing about the benefits of Bitcoin, funded numerous startups within the industry, built my own businesses around it, and have seen the price increase by more than 6,500,000%. Yet, this book is not a love story, and I wish it did not have to be written. The project I got involved with in 2011 has been hijacked and changed for the worse.
Bitcoin was designed to be digital cash, usable in everyday commerce, with minimal fees and fast transactions, and it worked that way for years. But today, Bitcoin is thought to be “digital gold,” not meant for everyday commerce, with high fees and slow transactions—a complete reversal of the original design. It’s discussed as a “store of value,” with little care for its utility as a payment system. Some people even claim that Bitcoin cannot work as a payment system, because it does not scale. These common ideas are simply untrue. The reason that Bitcoin is no longer used as digital cash has nothing to do with the underlying technology. It’s because a group of software developers took over the project, decided to change its design, and intentionally limited its functionality—whether due to incompetence, sabotage, or a mixture of both. The takeover happened from roughly 2014-2017, and it ultimately resulted in the network splitting in two and the cryptocurrency industry fracturing into a thousand pieces. The original design still exists and remains extremely promising, but it no longer trades under the ticker symbol “BTC.”
As I travel and continue to speak around the world about the benefits of cryptocurrency, it has become apparent that hardly anybody knows the story of Bitcoin’s takeover. The main discussion platforms online have been heavily censored for years and carefully control the information that people receive. Bitcoin Maximalists—the loud voices that insist all projects other than BTC are scams—also help to discourage critical investigation, mostly by bullying people on social media. Anybody that questions their narrative is instantly mocked, and this has proven to be an effective tactic for silencing dissent. Since nobody speaks up, newcomers have almost no chance of hearing about Bitcoin’s real history and design. This book provides that information.
Hijacking Bitcoin has three parts. Part I is a detailed look at the original design of Bitcoin and the radical changes made to it. Part II is the history of the takeover, including the many dirty tactics employed like censorship, propaganda, and attacks on businesses that dissented from the narrative. The final section, Part III, is about rescuing Bitcoin from its captors and providing a realistic vision for the future.
Getting involved early with a breakthrough technology is a dream of many entrepreneurs, and my journey has been filled with exciting moments and interesting stories. But this book is not a memoir. Its purpose is to educate. For the last few years, I have been sharing this information in private conversations, public speeches, and online videos, but now it’s time to put it all in writing. The goal is to help people understand Bitcoin’s current situation and how it got there. To the entrepreneurs and investors who are interested in bringing fast, cheap, reliable, and inflation-proof digital cash to the world: we can still do this. We just have to work together on the right project.
Part I:
An Ingenious Design
1
Altered Vision
Roger Ver does not blow his own trumpet in this book, but he truly is a hero of this saga, not only deeply knowledgeable of the technologies but also a man who has clung to an emancipatory vision of Bitcoin from the earliest days through the present. I share his commitment to the idea of peer-to-peer currency for the masses, alongside a competitive marketplace for free-enterprise monies. This is a hugely important documentary history, and the polemic alone will challenge anyone who believes himself to be on the other side. Regardless, this book had to exist, however painful. It’s a gift to the world.
Jeffrey Tucker
President, Brownstone Institute
Introduction
The past thirteen years of my life have been spent trying to make Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies the money of the future. The technology has the potential to make the world a radically freer and more prosperous place, and it will end up being one of the most important inventions of all time. I have spent more than a decade evangelizing about the benefits of Bitcoin, funded numerous startups within the industry, built my own businesses around it, and have seen the price increase by more than 6,500,000%. Yet, this book is not a love story, and I wish it did not have to be written. The project I got involved with in 2011 has been hijacked and changed for the worse.
Bitcoin was designed to be digital cash, usable in everyday commerce, with minimal fees and fast transactions, and it worked that way for years. But today, Bitcoin is thought to be “digital gold,” not meant for everyday commerce, with high fees and slow transactions—a complete reversal of the original design. It’s discussed as a “store of value,” with little care for its utility as a payment system. Some people even claim that Bitcoin cannot work as a payment system, because it does not scale. These common ideas are simply untrue. The reason that Bitcoin is no longer used as digital cash has nothing to do with the underlying technology. It’s because a group of software developers took over the project, decided to change its design, and intentionally limited its functionality—whether due to incompetence, sabotage, or a mixture of both. The takeover happened from roughly 2014-2017, and it ultimately resulted in the network splitting in two and the cryptocurrency industry fracturing into a thousand pieces. The original design still exists and remains extremely promising, but it no longer trades under the ticker symbol “BTC.”
As I travel and continue to speak around the world about the benefits of cryptocurrency, it has become apparent that hardly anybody knows the story of Bitcoin’s takeover. The main discussion platforms online have been heavily censored for years and carefully control the information that people receive. Bitcoin Maximalists—the loud voices that insist all projects other than BTC are scams—also help to discourage critical investigation, mostly by bullying people on social media. Anybody that questions their narrative is instantly mocked, and this has proven to be an effective tactic for silencing dissent. Since nobody speaks up, newcomers have almost no chance of hearing about Bitcoin’s real history and design. This book provides that information.
Hijacking Bitcoin has three parts. Part I is a detailed look at the original design of Bitcoin and the radical changes made to it. Part II is the history of the takeover, including the many dirty tactics employed like censorship, propaganda, and attacks on businesses that dissented from the narrative. The final section, Part III, is about rescuing Bitcoin from its captors and providing a realistic vision for the future.
Getting involved early with a breakthrough technology is a dream of many entrepreneurs, and my journey has been filled with exciting moments and interesting stories. But this book is not a memoir. Its purpose is to educate. For the last few years, I have been sharing this information in private conversations, public speeches, and online videos, but now it’s time to put it all in writing. The goal is to help people understand Bitcoin’s current situation and how it got there. To the entrepreneurs and investors who are interested in bringing fast, cheap, reliable, and inflation-proof digital cash to the world: we can still do this. We just have to work together on the right project.
Part I:
An Ingenious Design
1
Altered Vision
Foreword
By Jeffrey Tucker
The story you will read here is of tragedy, the chronicle of an emancipationist monetary technology subverted to other ends. It’s a painful read, to be sure, and the first time this story has been told with this much detail and sophistication. We had the chance to free the world. That chance was missed, likely hijacked and subverted.
Those of us who watched Bitcoin from the earliest days saw with fascination how it gained traction and seemed to offer a viable alternative path for the future of money. At long last, after thousands of years of government corruption of money, we finally had a technology that was untouchable, sound, stable, democratic, incorruptible, and a fulfillment of the vision of the great champions of freedom from all history. At last, money could be liberated from state control and thus achieve economic rather than political goals—prosperity for everyone versus war, inflation, and state expansion.
That was the vision in any case. Alas, it did not happen. Bitcoin adoption is lower today than it was five years ago. It is not on a trajectory of final victory but on a different path to gradually increase in price for its earlier adopters. In short, the technology was betrayed by small changes that hardly anyone understood at the time.
I certainly did not. I had been playing with Bitcoin for a few years and was mainly astounded at the speed of settlement, the low cost of transactions, and the ability for anyone without a bank to send or receive it without financial mediation. That’s a miracle about which I wrote rhapsodically at the time. I held a CryptoCurrency Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, in October 2013 that focused on the intellectual and technical side of things. It was among the first national conferences on the topic, but even at this event, I noticed two sides coalescing: those who believed in monetary competition and those whose sole commitment was to one protocol.
My first clue that something had gone wrong came two years later, when for the first time I saw that the network had been seriously clogged. Transaction fees soared, settlement slowed to a crawl, and vast numbers of on-ramps and off-ramps were closing due to high compliance costs. I did not understand. I reached out to a number of experts who explained to me about a quiet civil war that had developed within the crypto world. The so-called “maximalists” had turned against widespread adoption. They liked the high fees. They did not mind the slow settlements. And many were involving themselves in the dwindling number of crypto exchanges that were still in operation thanks to a government crackdown.
At the same time, new technologies were becoming available that vastly improved the efficiency and availability of exchange in fiat dollars. They included Venmo, Zelle, CashApp, FB payments, and many others besides, in addition to smartphone attachments and iPads that enabled any merchant of any size to process credit cards. These technologies were completely different from Bitcoin because they were permission-based and mediated by financial companies. But to users, they seemed great and their presence in the marketplace crowded out the use case of Bitcoin at the very time that my beloved technology had become an unrecognizable version of itself.
The forking of Bitcoin into Bitcoin Cash occurred two years later, in 2017, and it was accompanied by great cries and screams as if something horrible was happening. In fact, all that was happening was a mere restoration of the original vision of the founder Satoshi Nakamoto. He believed with the monetary historians of the past that the key to turning any commodity into widespread money was adoption and use. It’s impossible to even imagine conditions under which any commodity could take on the form of money without a viable and marketable use case. Bitcoin Cash was an attempt to restore that.
The time to ramp up adoption of this new technology was 2013-2016, but that moment was squeezed in two directions: the deliberate throttling of the ability of the technology to scale and the push of new payment systems to crowd out the use case. As this book demonstrates, by late 2013, Bitcoin had already been targeted for capture. By the time Bitcoin Cash came to the rescue, the network had changed its entire focus from using to holding what we have and building second-layer technologies to deal with the scaling issues. Here we are in 2024 with an industry struggling to find its way within a niche while the dreams of a “to-the-moon” price are fading into memory.
By Jeffrey Tucker
The story you will read here is of tragedy, the chronicle of an emancipationist monetary technology subverted to other ends. It’s a painful read, to be sure, and the first time this story has been told with this much detail and sophistication. We had the chance to free the world. That chance was missed, likely hijacked and subverted.
Those of us who watched Bitcoin from the earliest days saw with fascination how it gained traction and seemed to offer a viable alternative path for the future of money. At long last, after thousands of years of government corruption of money, we finally had a technology that was untouchable, sound, stable, democratic, incorruptible, and a fulfillment of the vision of the great champions of freedom from all history. At last, money could be liberated from state control and thus achieve economic rather than political goals—prosperity for everyone versus war, inflation, and state expansion.
That was the vision in any case. Alas, it did not happen. Bitcoin adoption is lower today than it was five years ago. It is not on a trajectory of final victory but on a different path to gradually increase in price for its earlier adopters. In short, the technology was betrayed by small changes that hardly anyone understood at the time.
I certainly did not. I had been playing with Bitcoin for a few years and was mainly astounded at the speed of settlement, the low cost of transactions, and the ability for anyone without a bank to send or receive it without financial mediation. That’s a miracle about which I wrote rhapsodically at the time. I held a CryptoCurrency Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, in October 2013 that focused on the intellectual and technical side of things. It was among the first national conferences on the topic, but even at this event, I noticed two sides coalescing: those who believed in monetary competition and those whose sole commitment was to one protocol.
My first clue that something had gone wrong came two years later, when for the first time I saw that the network had been seriously clogged. Transaction fees soared, settlement slowed to a crawl, and vast numbers of on-ramps and off-ramps were closing due to high compliance costs. I did not understand. I reached out to a number of experts who explained to me about a quiet civil war that had developed within the crypto world. The so-called “maximalists” had turned against widespread adoption. They liked the high fees. They did not mind the slow settlements. And many were involving themselves in the dwindling number of crypto exchanges that were still in operation thanks to a government crackdown.
At the same time, new technologies were becoming available that vastly improved the efficiency and availability of exchange in fiat dollars. They included Venmo, Zelle, CashApp, FB payments, and many others besides, in addition to smartphone attachments and iPads that enabled any merchant of any size to process credit cards. These technologies were completely different from Bitcoin because they were permission-based and mediated by financial companies. But to users, they seemed great and their presence in the marketplace crowded out the use case of Bitcoin at the very time that my beloved technology had become an unrecognizable version of itself.
The forking of Bitcoin into Bitcoin Cash occurred two years later, in 2017, and it was accompanied by great cries and screams as if something horrible was happening. In fact, all that was happening was a mere restoration of the original vision of the founder Satoshi Nakamoto. He believed with the monetary historians of the past that the key to turning any commodity into widespread money was adoption and use. It’s impossible to even imagine conditions under which any commodity could take on the form of money without a viable and marketable use case. Bitcoin Cash was an attempt to restore that.
The time to ramp up adoption of this new technology was 2013-2016, but that moment was squeezed in two directions: the deliberate throttling of the ability of the technology to scale and the push of new payment systems to crowd out the use case. As this book demonstrates, by late 2013, Bitcoin had already been targeted for capture. By the time Bitcoin Cash came to the rescue, the network had changed its entire focus from using to holding what we have and building second-layer technologies to deal with the scaling issues. Here we are in 2024 with an industry struggling to find its way within a niche while the dreams of a “to-the-moon” price are fading into memory.