Roger Ver, former “Bitcoin Jesus” known as a rigorous proponent of Bitcoin Cash for many years now, has taken to the X platform (formerly popular as Twitter) to remind the cryptocurrency community about the founder of the Silk Road darknet marketplace – Ross Ulbricht.
Roger Ver's important tweet about Ulbricht
Ver reminded the community that Ulbricht was sentenced to a double lifetime term in prison without a chance of parole. Ulbricht was arrested in 2013, when he was 29; the Silk Road, where illegal drugs were traded for Bitcoin, shut down the same year.
Since that year, he has been doing his jail time and has spent 11 years behind bars already. On March 27, he turned 40.
Roger Ver stressed that the creation of the Silk Road and all the trading performed on it was crucial for introducing Bitcoin to the world and added a link to the website, where anyone can sign the petition to urge U.S. authorities to set him free. Almost 600,000 people have left their signatures on it already. Ver wrote: "His 'crime' was building a website where people could trade freely without government permission."
Roger Ver's recent book on Bitcoin
Recently, Roger Ver co-authored a book called “Hijacking Bitcoin” in collaboration with Steve Patterson. In this book, Ver details his view that after Satoshi Nakamoto’s exit from the public space, Bitcoin was left in the hands of a narrow group of developers who changed BTC as they saw fit, thus corrupting the pioneer cryptocurrency, which was created as an alternative to government-controlled money and central banks.
One of the earliest Bitcoiners, who corresponded with Satoshi himself and then created the Bitcoin Lightning Network, Adam Back, addressed Ver in a tweet, offering him to return to BTC. However, another prominent Bitcoiner and Adam Back’s Blockstream’s chief strategy officer Samson Mow objected to that, saying that Ver should stay with Bitcoin Cash.