Why the Intel Agencies Want to Track Your Every Transaction and Throw Roger Ver in Jail for Life
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Summary
Roger Ver was the first person in the entire world to start investing in the Bitcoin ecosystem, and was one of the first people to start promoting Bitcoin as money and as cash for people all over the world. Now, Roger is being extradited to the United States to face a 109 year sentence for tax evasion. Could there be another reason the U.S. government is angry at him?
Transcript
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You are being extradited from Spain, an ally in Western Europe, a NATO country, to the United States by the U.S. Justice Department to face life in prison, 109 years, for tax evasion.
00:00:51.280
The period that you're being charged with evading American taxes, you are not a U.S. citizen.
00:00:55.740
And so whenever I see a story that says the U.S. government is extraditing somebody for tax evasion to put them in prison for 109 years, my first thought is maybe it's not really about the taxes.
00:01:11.660
Could there be another reason the U.S. government is angry at you and wants to put you in prison for the rest of your life?
00:01:17.220
Yeah, to be honest, I think they're not really angry about taxes at all.
00:01:20.540
I think they're just angry about my lack of obedience and lack of, you know, kissing their ring.
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I was the first person in the entire world to start investing in the Bitcoin ecosystem and investing in businesses that made it easy for people to use Bitcoin as money and as cash for people all over the world.
00:01:35.680
And I was promoting it since 2011 as, hey, stop using the U.S. dollar, stop using euros, stop using yen, start using Bitcoin.
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We have an alternative in which each individual anywhere on the planet can be in charge of their own money completely without needing permission from any politician or any government anywhere in the world.
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And when you're a government that loves controlling people through the control of the money supply, that's very, very threatening to their control of the world.
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And I knew that this sort of thing was dangerous, and I thought the safest path for me would be to not be a U.S. citizen.
00:02:04.220
So in 2014, I renounced my U.S. citizenship and became a citizen of the world effectively.
00:02:10.460
But my new nationality is St. Kitts, which is a wonderful little island in the Caribbean.
00:02:14.720
And I thought that that would be safe for me, and I could promote Bitcoin from there and obey.
00:02:20.240
Even though I may disagree with plenty of laws, I do my best to obey them because I know when you're advocating for things that change the world, governments don't like that and they can come after you.
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So I told all my tax attorneys and everybody else, we have to do everything perfect so that there's no room for the U.S. government to give me a hard time about any of this.
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And more than a decade after I had already renounced my U.S. citizenship, and just a couple of weeks after I published a book on the hijacking of Bitcoin, how it no longer works as peer-to-peer cash for the world, and it's been morphed into something that is just a digital asset that people are speculating on the price on, rather than something that can compete with the U.S. dollar and the euro and the yen for use as currency around the world.
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Suddenly, right after my book gets published, it exposes how people claiming to work for intelligence agencies hijack Bitcoin to do that.
00:03:03.360
Suddenly, I get arrested and tossed in jail in Spain and trying to be extradited to face more than 100 years in prison.
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I'm 45 today. I think my odds of being alive with conventional technology in 109 years from now aren't looking too good.
00:03:17.260
So effectively, to die in prison is what they want because they're so upset about the things I've been saying and the way I've been promoting cryptocurrency around the world.
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As the founder of Bitcoin.com, co-founder of XRP and Blockchain.com and a bunch of other companies, I literally seeded the entire first generation of cryptocurrency companies.
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And so they're furious at me for trying to have something that can compete with the U.S. dollar as the world's medium of exchange and currency.
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Now, I should just add an editorial comment. I mean, I am an American citizen and will remain one, I hope.
00:03:47.420
So I'm not against the U.S. dollar in principle. It's that the mismanagement of the U.S. dollar, I think, by the people in charge of it, the U.S. government, the Federal Reserve, has made it kind of a sketchy proposition long term.
00:04:02.160
It's like their mismanagement has forced people to think about alternatives.
00:04:05.140
And one of the most promising alternatives was Bitcoin.
00:04:10.520
And it was, I remember very well, since I'm 55, when it first appeared, the idea was this is a way for people to conduct business, to buy goods and services without being controlled.
00:04:22.540
To have, as you said, control over their own money, autonomy.
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And I'm very interested in how exactly that happened.
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And so if you wouldn't mind explaining the thesis of your book, what you saw, how that happened, you say subterfuge by the intel agencies played a role.
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I'll stop talking and let you explain what you saw.
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Yeah, I think to get started on that, we'll have to back up more than 25 years ago.
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So when I was a very young man, I ran for political office as a libertarian in California and called for, you know, lower taxes, less government in every area and everywhere.
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And for those of us that are old enough to remember, in the late 1990s, there was an incident in Waco, Texas, where there was a religious group there with, you know, a bunch of adults, but a bunch of kids.
00:05:10.540
Some of them, you know, three, four, five years old, like little kids.
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And even if the parents were religious nuts, the ATF and FBI literally burnt to death everybody in their home there and then posed for photos on top of the corpses of little kids.
00:05:27.400
And the FBI and ATF are a bunch of murderers for murdering kids.
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And even if the parents are, you know, doing something illegal, you don't murder the kids over that.
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And so in the debate with the Republican and Democratic candidates, I called the ATF a bunch of murderers that they are for having done that.
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I was a 20, 21-year-old kid that had seven or eight employees.
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And I wound up being the only person in the entire world to be prosecuted for selling the Firecracker on eBay, even though tons of other resellers were selling it.
00:06:01.620
I was literally the only person in the entire history of the world to be prosecuted for selling those without a permit.
00:06:07.240
And it wasn't about the fact that I sold them without a permit.
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It was they were mad about the things that I had said.
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And they even said as much in one of the discussions with my attorneys and the prosecutors and the ATF agents.
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The ATF agent literally, at one point, he pounded his hand on the table and said, you didn't hear the things that he said, referring to me calling them murderers.
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And if you burn to death a bunch of kids, you're a murderer.
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And so I wound up actually signing a plea deal to do 10 months in federal prison.
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If I had taken it to trial and lost, which I would have because I was guilty of the laws written, I sold firecrackers without a license, I would have done seven or eight years in prison.
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And so at that point, I no longer felt safe in the U.S.
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And so literally the day I was allowed to leave the U.S., I left.
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But the way I became a libertarian, I wasn't born a libertarian.
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I started somehow I found a book by Ludwig von Mises and then found some Milton Friedman and then later David Friedman.
00:07:01.740
And then Murray Rothbard is the author that really changed my life.
00:07:04.560
And it was just music to my ears recently hearing Millet down in Argentina talking about how Murray Rothbard was also one of the economists that influenced his life the most.
00:07:12.920
And I want to urge anybody, pick up anything by Murray Rothbard.
00:07:17.700
But in these books on economics, I learned about the origin of money and how something comes to be used as money.
00:07:30.220
It has to have these certain characteristics that make it usable as money.
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But then when I went to federal prison, inside prison, everybody's using things as money.
00:07:42.940
Everybody's buying and selling things with each other.
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And the things they're using are tobacco, postage stamps, and top ramen soups.
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And if you think about it, all those things have those characteristics.
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And all those things just naturally, without any order from a guard or any inmate or anybody,
00:08:06.500
And so then we fast forward more than a decade later there, Bitcoin came along.
00:08:12.560
And I had the theoretical knowledge from the books that I had read.
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And I had the practical experience from my time in prison.
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There was no doubt in my mind whatsoever that people were going to start using Bitcoin as money.
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And so I thought, oh, this is every libertarian's dream come true.
00:08:28.280
And I'm not against the U.S. dollar or the yen or the euro.
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I think people should be able to choose what form of money they want to use.
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And whether it's the dollar, the euro, the yen, or Bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency out there,
00:08:39.280
I think people deserve the right to have that choice.
00:08:44.300
And so when Bitcoin came along, the first step was for me to buy a bunch of Bitcoin.
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I bought my first Bitcoin when they were less than a dollar each.
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became the first established business in the entire world to start accepting Bitcoin for payments.
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Not a single customer paid us initially in Bitcoin,
00:09:01.020
but it got worldwide media attention for the first time.
00:09:09.740
the price of Bitcoin went from around $3 a Bitcoin to $30 a Bitcoin.
00:09:14.040
And that was the first time in the history of Bitcoin up to that point
00:09:17.400
in which it started to get some worldwide media attention.
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So the main discussion forum where everybody up to that point was talking about Bitcoin
00:09:28.100
And suddenly when it was getting some media attention around the world and international
00:09:31.700
newspapers, this forum that had worked wonderfully up to that point where people could discuss
00:09:35.880
things became flooded with bots, just posting comments that were just, you know, fluff and
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made literally, they DDoSed the forum to the point that it was unusable.
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And anybody that came there because they heard about Bitcoin in the media that week,
00:09:48.280
they weren't able to learn about it because there's just so many posts saying, you know,
00:09:51.280
buy, sell, oh no, and just saying nothing of any substance whatsoever.
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So somebody out there literally made the forum unusable as early as 2011.
00:10:01.540
And around that same time, we already know that the CIA was interested in Bitcoin because
00:10:05.240
they're asking different Bitcoin developers to, hey, can you explain Bitcoin to us?
00:10:08.800
So way back when the vast majority of the world hadn't even heard of Bitcoin yet,
00:10:12.420
the CIA was looking into it and somebody was actively preventing it from spreading as quickly
00:10:16.500
as it otherwise could have by shutting down the forum effectively.
00:10:19.220
When so many new people were coming to Bitcoin to learn about it for the first time.
00:10:23.320
And in the early days, everybody knew though, Bitcoin was supposed to be money for the world.
00:10:27.320
Bitcoin was supposed to be used for payments as peer-to-peer cash for the world.
00:10:31.860
And, you know, I was doing payroll on it and I was paying my suppliers overseas.
00:10:34.560
I hosted the first Bitcoin meetup ever in China about it.
00:10:37.840
Like I was really doing my best to spread this all over the world, including, you know,
00:10:45.040
But then later in, I believe, 2012, a person using the name John Dillon, who claimed to work
00:10:56.640
I forget the exact amount, but a significant sum of money to start producing propaganda
00:11:01.360
to trick people into thinking that by keeping the blocks on Bitcoin small, it would make it
00:11:07.820
And literally the exact opposite of the truth, the exact opposite of the way Satoshi Nakamoto,
00:11:12.740
the creator of Bitcoin, designed it and promoted it, and the exact opposite of the way that
00:11:19.480
But then later, this giant wave of censorship took place.
00:11:22.780
Anonymous people that nobody knows their real names managed to get control of all the main
00:11:29.260
And then suddenly, one day overnight, nobody was even allowed to advocate for Bitcoin being
00:11:33.820
And they censored anybody that tried to do that.
00:11:39.080
But then everybody that came to Bitcoin after the censorship began, they just started believing
00:11:44.640
And today, the main people that are out there promoting Bitcoin, they literally say, oh,
00:11:58.460
They've, through the censorship and the propaganda, they've literally hijacked Bitcoin.
00:12:08.980
And lo and behold, just a couple of weeks after the book is published, I get arrested.
00:12:13.760
And now I'm facing 109 years in federal prison for having exposed the way in which Bitcoin
00:12:19.060
And you can think all day long that the new version of Bitcoin that people are promoting
00:12:23.940
OK, but you can't admit that it wasn't hijacked.
00:12:26.560
And luckily, now we have thousands of different cryptocurrencies.
00:12:30.280
I was never a Bitcoin maximalist or any other cryptocurrency maximalist.
00:12:36.260
Whatever gives the most utility and is the most useful for the most people around the
00:12:39.280
world to improve their lives and create more economic freedom that leads to more economic
00:12:43.500
That's what I want to be out there and promote to the world.
00:12:48.420
But let's just begin with the core promise of Bitcoin, as we both remember vividly, was
00:12:53.860
that I would be able to conduct transactions, buy goods and services privately without federal
00:13:00.860
control, that there was anonymity because it was digital.
00:13:06.540
And I could sort of have freedom in the things that I bought.
00:13:12.760
How exactly did they control conversation about that?
00:13:18.900
You say that they censored the discussion boards.
00:13:25.780
So there were two main discussion platforms where everybody was talking about Bitcoin.
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And everybody was busy talking about Bitcoin in those places.
00:13:37.800
And the same anonymous individual managed to get moderatorship position or ownership of both
00:13:43.120
And one day, he decided to turn on the censorship and they would ban anybody that would state
00:13:49.640
anything that wasn't in line with the small block propaganda about Bitcoin.
00:13:55.040
And when the censorship first began, people started a thread on Reddit complaining about
00:13:59.600
At that point, it was the most upvoted thread ever in the entire history of that Bitcoin subreddit.
00:14:06.040
They then deleted that post as well and banned the people that were participating in that post.
00:14:10.200
And the censorship still goes on to this very day.
00:14:12.260
If you go on OurBitcoin or BitcoinTalk.org and post anything in favor of Bitcoin being
00:14:16.420
able to scale to be money for the world, they will ban your account.
00:14:20.960
So the average person that's involved in Bitcoin today, they just see, oh, the price
00:14:26.040
And Michael Saylor is talking about, you know, pay your taxes and don't be inflammatory.
00:14:31.600
That's going to make Visa and MasterCard and the government angry.
00:14:35.240
He's saying literally the exact opposite of what everybody was saying in the beginning of Bitcoin,
00:14:38.840
which is like this finally gives people a choice as to what form of money they were
00:14:42.840
And so imagine if everybody was using Bitcoin as money in commerce to, you know, do their
00:14:47.600
payroll and buy things online and pay for everything.
00:14:50.840
How would the US government be able to give billions and billions of dollars to Ukraine
00:14:56.500
How would they be able to spend billions and billions of dollars on all these foreign wars
00:14:59.640
that most people don't want to be able to have happen?
00:15:01.620
They wouldn't be able to just inflate it out of thin air.
00:15:04.080
Suddenly, government would be much, much more accountable to the people.
00:15:06.840
And, you know, they teach everybody in school, oh, government, you know, government works
00:15:11.800
Well, if people were using a hard asset cryptocurrency as money in everyday life, government really
00:15:16.380
would have to be much more accountable to the people than they are today.
00:15:21.180
So that's why they've been doing everything they can to subvert Bitcoin and prevent people
00:15:24.800
from being able to use cryptocurrencies as money in daily life, whether it's from tax
00:15:28.240
policy or tax reporting or exit taxes or anything else.
00:15:33.380
In fact, even the people that are in the studio here that we're recording this with, I offered
00:15:38.520
The reason they didn't want it is because they're scared of the tax ramifications around it,
00:15:41.720
because government's going to lose control of the money supply.
00:15:44.900
And if they lose control of the money supply, they lose control of most of their control
00:15:49.060
But if you believe in individual rights and individual freedom and people being in charge
00:15:52.860
of their own destiny, it's a wonderful thing when government loses the ability to control
00:16:01.080
I've been promoting cryptocurrencies as currency for people worldwide, whether you're, you know,
00:16:05.360
stuck in Spain awaiting extradition or in the U.S. or anywhere else on the planet.
00:16:11.440
And they need to go head to head and compete with the U.S. dollar and the euro and the yen
00:16:16.560
Because when people have more choices, their lives are better off and it results in more
00:16:21.860
More economic freedom results in more economic growth.
00:16:24.160
And more economic growth raises everybody's standard of living, which literally makes
00:16:27.620
every single person's life on the planet a better off.
00:16:29.880
And that's why it's such an exciting thing for me to be involved in.
00:16:33.080
And that's why I'm doing it despite risking 109 years in federal prison for just telling
00:16:37.220
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So the original promise was Bitcoin will make you free and then it became quickly through
00:21:43.280
And that was enough to kind of derail the promise.
00:21:49.740
I mean, and you could very easily kind of not say anything and just be happily rich with
00:21:58.280
And so it sounds like your ideological commitment is overriding your financial interests.
00:22:06.640
So like I was a multimillionaire before Bitcoin had ever even been invented.
00:22:10.760
I had my own tech companies in Silicon Valley that had done very well for me.
00:22:13.560
Lots of people talk about, oh, win Lambo and I'm going to sell my Bitcoin and buy a Lambo.
00:22:17.840
I had had multiple Lamborghinis before Bitcoin had ever even been invented.
00:22:21.300
When Bitcoin came along, I was such a big believer in Bitcoin that I sold my Lamborghini
00:22:26.640
That's how excited I was about this philosophically and emotionally and intellectually because this
00:22:31.740
is literally one of the best tools the world has ever seen to give individuals more control
00:22:37.140
And so I was headed in the exact opposite direction of most of the people that are involved in
00:22:41.960
I was selling things to buy more Bitcoin because I knew this was going to become money for the
00:22:50.120
But cryptocurrencies are still certainly the way of the future.
00:22:56.700
When Bitcoin first came out, there was no Apple Pay.
00:23:02.520
But governments successfully delayed the adoption of cryptocurrencies so that now suddenly the
00:23:07.240
traditional financial systems had a chance to catch up and get a lot more done.
00:23:11.280
And it's just really, really frustrating because life is short as anybody, you know, as each
00:23:19.880
And there's less and less of each of our lifespans left.
00:23:22.840
We need the benefits brought by cryptocurrency as soon as possible.
00:23:25.800
And we know all the benefits for the world as soon as possible.
00:23:27.900
Like, let's not waste time if that's exactly what governments around the world have been
00:23:31.400
They've been delaying and hindering the adoption of cryptocurrency as money, which is literally
00:23:36.360
delaying the progress of all of humankind and all of human society.
00:23:39.200
And it's really frustrating to see that happen.
00:23:41.900
The most frustrating part, from my perspective, is the inability to use cryptocurrency, apparently,
00:23:51.940
I'll be, you know, I earned the money, didn't do anything wrong.
00:23:55.180
And I would like to buy something that's sort of no one's business, whether I'm buying it
00:24:09.640
Is it now possible to conduct any kind of business with crypto anonymously?
00:24:14.860
So in the early days, everybody thought Bitcoin was basically anonymous and people treated
00:24:19.600
And then websites came up that were selling things that governments might not necessarily
00:24:24.960
And people were using Bitcoin for that because they thought it was basically anonymous.
00:24:28.080
And then later on, we found out that it wasn't anonymous at all.
00:24:31.200
But additional steps were taken to make Bitcoin even less anonymous.
00:24:34.620
And today, most people are just using custodial wallets, which are, you know, it's not even a
00:24:39.240
And it's no more private than your Bank of America or PayPal account.
00:24:42.480
In fact, it's even less private than those things because anybody can take a look at
00:24:47.300
But luckily, there's other cryptocurrencies out there that do give people more privacy.
00:24:51.080
So there's things like Monero, which most people are now using if they want some privacy.
00:24:55.100
But there's even more exciting technologies and coins out there.
00:24:57.600
There's another one called Zeno that allows anybody to create their own privacy token in
00:25:03.320
And if you really want to get the three-letter agencies upset or governments upset, there's
00:25:07.560
a project called Confidential Layer, which is creating a bridge from Bitcoin
00:25:15.440
So you can take Bitcoin with no privacy at all or Ethereum with no privacy at all and
00:25:19.200
bridge it permissionlessly with no custodian and no central point of attack onto Zeno.
00:25:24.380
And when it's on Zeno, you have very, very strong privacy with that as well.
00:25:27.540
And so I think that's going to make a whole lot more privacy come to the entire
00:25:34.140
Like Monero that I mentioned before, it's preemptively banned from being listed on most
00:25:39.920
And that's simply because governments have much less of an ability to spy on people that
00:25:46.160
And that's why I'm a big fan of things like Monero or Zeno today.
00:25:50.160
But in fact, today, I would be embarrassed to promote.
00:25:53.200
I am embarrassed to promote Bitcoin to people today because the transactions are slow, expensive,
00:25:59.940
I'd be proud to promote something like a Monero or a Zeno or a Zcash or a Zcoin or any of these
00:26:04.120
privacy tools out there because those are the ones that provide more individual control
00:26:08.780
to people and more privacy and more economic freedom to people over the world.
00:26:12.060
People are claiming that Bitcoin is freedom money, but I'm really afraid that they're
00:26:15.000
literally building the financial prison walls around themselves.
00:26:17.660
Like if you look at what's going on in El Salvador, everybody's excited about Bitcoin
00:26:20.880
there, but they're all using custodial accounts that the government can see every single transaction
00:26:25.440
you're making and they can freeze your account at any time.
00:26:31.700
And so anybody that's paying attention should be really, really concerned about this, and
00:26:35.720
they should be advocating the use of cryptocurrencies in which individuals can actually have control
00:26:39.340
of their own money and have control over their own lives, their own destiny.
00:26:42.120
And maybe that'll be Bitcoin, thanks to this new technology called Confidential Layer that
00:26:49.240
And I don't know what it's going to be, but we need to be really, really careful because
00:26:53.360
it could wind up that before we know it and before we realize it, we've built the financial
00:26:57.820
prison walls around us and it's too late to get out and too late to escape.
00:27:06.420
A lot of people in the crypto world, I think, are admirable people.
00:27:11.280
One you mentioned, actually, people I like and admire and largely agree with.
00:27:15.880
But I'm a little bit confused as to why you're the only person I've ever heard say what you
00:27:20.500
Why aren't the people promoting various cryptocurrencies also sounding the alarm that none of the transactions
00:27:27.940
you conduct using these currencies are private.
00:27:29.940
In fact, they're very easily trackable by government.
00:27:35.520
Lots of people are saying that, but very few people other than myself have a big enough
00:27:39.820
platform or a loud enough voice to get much attention.
00:27:42.460
And because I had such a big platform and big voice, boom, suddenly I'm looking at 109 years
00:27:50.060
And again, if the solution to ideas or people saying things that you don't agree with is
00:27:55.400
more debate and more discussion and more free speech, whereas most of the people promoting
00:27:59.840
Bitcoin at this point, they've taken the exact opposite.
00:28:02.240
They've been supporting the propaganda and the censorship, which I'm on the exact opposite.
00:28:07.060
In fact, initially, when the debate started happening as to what should be the proper scaling
00:28:10.820
method for Bitcoin, my heart was already on what was called like the big block side, but
00:28:20.920
And as I tried to listen, suddenly one side started to try and censor the other side.
00:28:25.340
And I already knew I was on the side of free speech.
00:28:27.280
And so as soon as one side tried to censor the other side, I knew, OK, it's time for me
00:28:31.760
I'm on the side of free speech and I'm on the side of Bitcoin being able to scale in
00:28:35.160
the original way that the Bitcoin white paper described as peer-to-peer cash for the entire
00:28:39.720
world that's very different than just the speculative asset.
00:28:46.420
Maybe it would have been $100,000 half a decade ago if it hadn't been hijacked and hadn't
00:28:50.760
been destroyed in its usefulness as cash for the world.
00:28:53.340
So you need to look at what's seen and what's not seen.
00:28:56.000
And what we see today, OK, it's close to $100,000.
00:28:58.480
What's not seen is what it could have been if companies like Microsoft and Expedia and these
00:29:02.960
other big companies around the world didn't have to stop accepting Bitcoin because of its
00:29:06.940
slow transaction fees, slow transaction times and unreliable transactions and lack of privacy
00:29:14.820
But thank you for giving me a platform to help sound the alarm because I don't want to
00:29:18.320
see the entire world wind up imprisoning themselves inside of some sort of a financial prison that
00:29:23.220
they're building, even if it has a cool sounding name like Bitcoin.
00:29:32.080
But whoever he is or wherever he is, he literally invented one of the most important things in
00:29:36.480
the entire history of humankind up there on par with how important the invention of electricity
00:29:42.120
It really is one of the most world changing technologies ever.
00:29:45.540
And so whoever he is, wherever he is or they are or she is, they deserve their privacy because
00:29:52.120
So it doesn't sound like you're suspicious that Bitcoin was created by the intel agencies
00:30:02.140
I don't think it was created that way initially, but I am suspicious and I do think that the
00:30:07.560
intelligences and other groups have converted it and hijacked it into becoming a financial
00:30:13.260
I just want to apologize, by the way, I was laughing off camera saying you're so great at
00:30:22.660
It's sort of an awful thing to say because they actually are trying to put you in prison.
00:30:26.100
And so rather than making fun of something so awful, I would love to know if you think
00:30:38.220
But the most useful way, I think, is to get the public to speak out, right?
00:30:41.440
Like the more people that speak out, the safer all of us can be.
00:30:45.320
And so one of the most egregious things here, too, is like the IRS with guns on their hip,
00:30:51.180
they literally showed up at my attorney's office and my accountant's office.
00:30:56.800
You're not supposed to be able to do that in the U.S.
00:30:58.980
Like you're supposed to be able to talk to your attorneys and that's supposed to be private.
00:31:02.660
And so all the information is available over at a website that supporters set up at
00:31:09.140
They recently filed what's called a motion to dismiss, where you can literally see with
00:31:13.900
your own eyes that the U.S. government is literally lying in their indictment.
00:31:18.740
And the proof is up there with the emails between myself and my attorneys.
00:31:28.780
They're just lying every which way because they don't want the world to know the truth
00:31:31.920
about cryptocurrencies that they can be used to empower individuals to have control of
00:31:35.400
their own lives beyond the control of, you know, politicians who have never met you and
00:31:42.420
So like the fact that now people anywhere on the planet have access to money that can
00:31:45.920
they can use to escape inflation or they can use it to escape other, you know, oppressionary
00:31:51.120
Cryptocurrency is an amazing, amazing tool for freedom around the world.
00:32:00.380
I wish I had even more hard proof, but I don't think it's a coincidence.
00:32:04.640
They arrested me as soon as my book came out and I was about to go on a big media tour
00:32:08.160
promoting the fact that Bitcoin has been hijacked.
00:32:10.280
And suddenly they have me arrested and tossed into jail for a month in Barcelona and they were
00:32:16.140
But this is the first media interview I've done since I've been out.
00:32:20.960
This is a really, really big deal for the entire world.
00:32:25.380
This is literally affects every single person on the planet.
00:32:28.880
And so like another example of that is, you know, Apple, people all over the world use
00:32:32.400
Apple's an American company, but it affects every single person on the planet.
00:32:37.700
People all over the planet that aren't Americans also get to benefit from it.
00:32:45.280
Everybody on the planet, even if it's somebody working on it in the US or Spain or somewhere
00:32:49.180
else, everybody on the planet gets to benefit from it.
00:32:51.780
And, you know, and by benefit from it, I mean, they get to have more control over their own
00:32:56.560
lives, their own finances, their own financial sovereignty.
00:33:01.800
And that's why they don't want you to read hijacking Bitcoin.
00:33:04.060
So you can hear with citations for everything how Bitcoin was hijacked and people are promoting
00:33:08.720
it today is literally the exact opposite of what it started out as.
00:33:12.220
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You'll be forgiven if you assumed it is, because that's the message you receive.
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But most people sense deep down there may be a little bit more to Christmas.
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Maybe this is the time of year to focus on growing your relationship with God.
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00:37:03.920
I'm a little bit surprised that the government of Spain is honoring the extradition request.
00:37:19.080
I mean, the U.S. government just sent $100 billion to Ukraine without an audit to the
00:37:27.120
You know, and a huge percentage is being stolen.
00:37:30.080
So the idea that the U.S. government is so upset that you, a non-citizen, didn't pay
00:37:34.660
U.S. taxes, which you're not even obligated to pay, is like absurd on its face.
00:37:40.120
How did the Spanish government participate in what's obviously a grotesque miscarriage of
00:37:48.640
If I can interject, not only are they mad about the taxes, I wasn't an American, and
00:37:56.860
I was not American, not living in the U.S., and they're claiming I owe them more U.S.
00:38:03.500
But if you look at it, when there's a political persecution, they just have to make stuff up
00:38:08.380
And the most common way they do it is they use the government tax code because it's so
00:38:12.960
Even people that want to comply with every last little detail and how the best professionals,
00:38:20.040
They can get you if they want you, and that's what they do time and time again.
00:38:23.240
And so in regards to the Spanish government, I have an amazing attorney here, Jaime Campanier.
00:38:27.360
I'm really hoping that he's going to be successful here.
00:38:30.840
He's optimistic about the whole situation, but you don't know.
00:38:34.260
And it's a really terrifying way to live day to day.
00:38:37.100
If I win and that Spain decides not to extradite me, they'll send me or my attorney a letter
00:38:41.440
and say, congratulations, you're not being extradited.
00:38:44.180
If I lose and they decide to extradite me, they don't tell me in advance.
00:38:47.600
They'll just be a knock at my door one morning, and they'll grab me, and they'll put me in jail,
00:38:53.480
I won't be able to return the rental car or tell the landlord or anything else.
00:38:57.140
They'll literally just come to my house, grab me one morning, and I won't know in advance
00:39:02.460
And so it's not a fun way to live day to day knowing if this is your last day,
00:39:06.280
you know, not in prison potentially for the rest of your entire life.
00:39:09.340
And so, but I'm cautiously optimistic that Spain will be able to see through this and see
00:39:13.980
that what a politically motivated persecution this is by a bunch of people that are just,
00:39:18.520
you know, jealous. Like, if I hadn't been treated so unfairly politically the last time around when
00:39:22.320
I ran for political office and tried to change the system within, I'd still be, you know, a proud
00:39:26.720
flag-waving American today. And I still, the values of my heart are still some of the most
00:39:30.980
American values there are. And if you think about it, people say, oh, you renounced your U.S.
00:39:34.540
citizen, you know, ship. That's not very patriotic. Are you kidding? That's exactly the values
00:39:38.860
that America was founded on. It was a bunch of British people that renounced their citizenship and
00:39:42.440
said, I don't like laws you guys are passing. I'm not going to be a part of this anymore. So
00:39:46.040
renouncing your citizenship is actually one of the most patriotic American-esque
00:39:49.580
things you can possibly do. And I hope the Spanish government will be able to see. Like,
00:39:54.620
I've been out there, you know, speaking out to the world about the benefits of cryptocurrency.
00:39:59.200
The U.S. government has the most to lose because the dollar is the world reserve currency. So they
00:40:03.060
like it less than even other governments. This is clearly a politically motivated persecution.
00:40:07.260
And my faith and hope and, you know, my dreams are with the Spanish government to not extradite
00:40:15.020
me at this point. And I hope they do the right thing and they can see what's going on. But
00:40:18.320
I also, you know, have, maybe I can beat the whole thing at trial as well. But, you know,
00:40:23.820
you never know. You're rolling the dice there, even though I'm completely innocent. But we also could
00:40:27.400
have the Department of Justice, Nairus, just drop all the charges because it's completely,
00:40:31.880
I'm completely innocent. And we literally fought this thing all the way to the Supreme Court in
00:40:36.580
regards to my attorney-client privilege documents. When they finally got access to those documents,
00:40:42.340
they were probably mad because it was me literally telling my attorneys,
00:40:45.140
do everything perfectly, do everything perfectly. I don't want to have any problems. And so
00:40:48.820
they had a big, giant letdown. So there was a Supreme Court case in regards to myself.
00:40:52.520
People need to understand how insane it is that the IRS raided my tax attorney,
00:40:58.220
their office. How can you raid someone's attorney's office to violate attorney-client
00:41:03.460
privilege in the U.S.? That's the stuff that all the U.S. propaganda wants you to believe goes on
00:41:07.320
in Russia all the time and other countries. But they're doing it right, you know, right there
00:41:10.760
at home and where I was born and raised in the United States of America. It's insane that that's
00:41:15.240
going on. So President Biden can do the right thing. He just recently, you know, pardoned his son.
00:41:20.340
He can issue a preemptive pardon for me. Trump, when he gets into office, if anybody knows what
00:41:24.920
it's like to be the victim of lawfare, it's Trump. So I think he'll be able to see it in this case
00:41:29.460
as well. He can issue a preemptive pardon for me as well and a bunch of other people that deserve
00:41:33.500
it. I'm not the only one, right? There's a whole long list of people out there that have been the
00:41:38.520
victim of lawfare. And more often than not, it's people that are engaged in something that the U.S.
00:41:42.440
doesn't like politically. And if you rock the boat and the state doesn't like it, they're going to
00:41:47.420
come after you. And I'm just one more on that long, long, long list of people that they've
00:41:51.720
attacked and trying to destroy their lives. If I wasn't in this business, I wouldn't believe
00:41:57.900
any of this. I wouldn't think anything you were saying was true. I've just seen it so often.
00:42:02.100
Just a specific point. Are you allowed to leave Spain or are you imprisoned by Spain? Can you leave
00:42:09.120
the country? So no, not only can I not leave the country, I'm on an island in Spain, off the coast
00:42:14.300
of Spain called Mallorca. I'm not even allowed to leave this island. I'm not allowed to go on a boat.
00:42:18.920
I'm not allowed to do anything. And every 48 hours, I have to check in with the court and show
00:42:22.760
them my ID and prove that I didn't run away. And again, any day could be my last year. If they
00:42:27.200
decide they are going to extradite me, they'll just show up unannounced and arrest me here in Spain and
00:42:31.200
put me back in the Spanish prison and then at some point ship me to the U.S. prison as well. And so
00:42:35.560
that's like a pretty nerve-wracking way to live day after day here in Spain. So Spain's a wonderful
00:42:41.240
country, but I would love to be here voluntarily.
00:42:42.900
It's shocking that Spain can act as the jailers for the U.S. government on transparently fake
00:42:51.220
charges. So you already spent a month in Spanish prison? What was that like?
00:42:55.880
My Spanish is certainly better than it was before that happened.
00:43:02.000
Yeah. And actually, because I'm such a clean-cut, well-spoken guy, there were a couple of other
00:43:07.380
people in the prison starting to think I must be some sort of an American undercover spy spying on the
00:43:12.140
prison. So some of the other inmates were really wary of me and didn't want to speak to me. And
00:43:15.840
luckily, nobody found out who I was or what my role was in regards to cryptocurrency. But some
00:43:21.400
people were awfully suspicious of me, and I was very glad to get out when I finally did.
00:43:25.820
And the U.S. government was very angry that they granted me bail here in Spain. They wanted to hold
00:43:29.720
me in jail in Spain the entire time in a country. I think this was only the second time I'd ever even
00:43:34.780
visited Spain ever. I thought I was only going to be here for four days. There was a cryptocurrency
00:43:38.920
conference about privacy cryptocurrencies here, about Zeno and Monero and things like that.
00:43:43.340
I thought I was just going to be here for that. And I was in the hotel lobby after the conference,
00:43:47.360
and some guy I didn't know came up to me with a thick Spanish accent and said,
00:43:50.460
are you Roger Veer? And I said, yes. And Roger Veer, yes. And like three or four times back and
00:43:54.660
forth. And when I finally convinced him that I was Roger Veer and that we had overcome the language
00:43:58.520
barrier, and I thought he was a crypto guy and wanted to ask for like a, you know, autographed copy of
00:44:02.420
my book or talk about crypto or something. Then he pulled out his badge and said that he has an
00:44:06.360
Interpol arrest warrant. They arrested me right there in the lobby of the hotel in Barcelona and,
00:44:10.820
you know, hauled me off to jail in Spain. And boy, was I not expecting that one bit to happen.
00:44:16.120
And talk about having your world turned upside down. But it just makes me even more motivated
00:44:20.440
because cryptocurrencies are such a powerful, powerful tool for every human being on the planet.
00:44:25.360
How could I not be quiet about spreading this good message to everybody around the world? So
00:44:29.700
congratulations, America. You made me even more motivated to spread cryptocurrency
00:44:33.220
adoption to the world. That is just one of the craziest stories I think I've ever heard.
00:44:39.000
Roger, Godspeed. We are just rooting for you fervently. And I hope this helps in some small way.
00:44:46.760
Anyway, you're in our thoughts. Thank you. My pleasure, Tucker. And if I can ask people that
00:44:50.920
want to show their support, please head over to freerogernow.org. And I would deeply appreciate that.