Bitcoin Cash (BCH) pioneer and early crypto adopter Roger Ver claims the US government was attempting to subvert Bitcoin (BTC) as far back as 2011.
Ver says in a new interview with Tucker Carlson that Bitcointalk.org, an early BTC forum, was flooded with bots the same week Bitcoin started to get worldwide media attention for the first time.
“Somebody out there literally made the forum unusable as early as 2011. And around that same time, we already know that the CIA was interested in Bitcoin because they were asking different Bitcoin developers, ‘Hey can you explain Bitcoin to us?’ So way back when the vast majority of the world hadn’t even heard of Bitcoin yet, the CIA was looking into it and somebody was actively preventing it from spreading as quickly as it otherwise could have by shutting down the forum effectively when so many new people were coming to Bitcoin to learn about it for the first time.”
Ver, an early investor of Bitcoin who later decided to support the BCH fork, claims that propaganda, possibly from US intelligence agencies, was spread to trick people into believing it was important to keep the BTC block sizes small.
Ver was a vocal “big-blocker” in the Bitcoin Blocksize War who wanted to increase BTC block sizes to enable cheaper, faster transactions. “Small blockers” like Blockstream chief executive Adam Back argued that Bitcoin’s original 1MB-sized blocks kept the network decentralized.
Ver was arrested in Spain in late April at the direction of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and faces multiple charges, including mail fraud, tax evasion and filing false tax returns.
Despite renouncing his United States citizenship in 2014 after obtaining citizenship in Saint Kitts and Nevis, authorities say Ver should’ve filed tax returns that reported capital gains from the sale of his worldwide assets, including his Bitcoin, and reported the fair market value of his assets.
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