Hijacking Bitcoin: The Hidden History of BTC
Roger Ver is a heavily influential first-generation proponent of Bitcoin. His unrelenting evangelism for Bitcoin1 earned him the moniker “Bitcoin Jesus”. Ver believes widespread adoption of Bitcoin will create a libertarian free market alternative to government control and fiat currency. According to Ver in Hijacking Bitcoin, the roadblock is Bitcoin’s block size.
Ver walks the walk of his anti-government, libertarian sentiment. In 2002, he spent 10 months in Federal prison for selling on eBay a pest control explosive also used for fireworks. Ver renounced his U.S. citizenship in 2014 and became a citizen of St Kitts & Nevis. A decade later in April 2024 while attending a Bitcoin conference in Barcelona, Spain, the U.S. had Ver arrested on tax charges related to his bitcoin holdings when he terminated his U.S. citizenship. As of today, Ver awaits extradition from Spain. His legal status is in limbo while he remains under house arrest in Mallorca. John McAfee was a previously well-known anti-government, pro-cryptocurrency personality at odds with the U.S. legal system that Spain arrested for extradition to the U.S. McAfee tweeted he wasn’t suicidal and tattooed $WHACKD on his right arm in case he ended up dead in his cell—which he did, a la Epstein. Despite McAfee’s tattoo-stated warning, Spain ruled his death in a Spanish prison cell a suicide.
To Ver’s credit, he saw Bitcoin’s potential in 2011 long before it became a mainstream entity and went all in on its potential. Ver has funded many Bitcoin startups and has been intimately involved and integral to Bitcoin’s evolution from a digital cash and blockchain experiment to its current wildly speculative asset status.
Hijacking Bitcoin is Ver’s history of how Satoshi’s vision went awry in the war over Bitcoin’s block size. In his view, a small group hijacked Bitcoin and its promise of peer-to-peer electronic cash transactions by locking the Bitcoin protocol into 1MB block transactions with high fees. In its early days, Satoshi coded a 1MB block size to prevent an attack on the system. This was meant to be temporary, but when Satoshi ceded his governance of Bitcoin to other developers, the small block group got control and permanently maintained the 1MB block2. Disagreement over block size and Satoshi’s vision started the Bitcoin war which continues today. Most notably, Bitcoin’s intended electronic cash function has transitioned to Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy view of bitcoin as digital capital instead of currency. According to Saylor, exponential price appreciation of bitcoin as a speculative asset will solve all of America’s problems.
Ver and other notable big block proponents have always had the option to hard fork off Bitcoin Core. With a hard fork, they could create a new Bitcoin blockchain with larger block sizes and the ability for future block scaling, micropayments, low fees, and global demand for an unrestricted digital payment system. Bitcoin Core would remain as it was with small block size and its original claim to the bitcoin currency symbol, BTC.
The hard fork finally came In 20173. The new forked blockchain became Bitcoin Cash, BCH. Ver and self-proclaimed Satoshi Craig Wright were the main public promoters for the BCH fork. A little over a year later, Wright hard-forked over disagreements with the BCH protocol to BSV. The BSV fork turned into a hash war with BSV attempting to destroy the BCH blockchain. In the end, they both wasted millions of dollars on mining, then threw in the towel and went their separate ways. Both BCH and BSV have scaled to larger block sizes, with BSV claiming its new Teranode technology will enable unlimited block sizes.
The question has to be asked: How can Bitcoin be hijacked when an open-source protocol allows a hard fork to create whatever Bitcoin blockchain a proponent claims is Satoshi’s true vision? By definition, a hostage is not hijacked if the hijacker does not have the power to retain the hostage in its custody. If a Bitcoin protocol blocks Satoshi’s vision, Bitcoin’s open source allows a fork to a new protocol that ends the roadblock.
As Ver describes, hard forks are extremely disruptive. It splits a Bitcoin network and forces developers, miners, and users to choose between the competing forked protocols. The war over Ver and others’ belief that small blocks inhibit bitcoin’s adoption by billions of potential users, ensured a hard fork would eventually happen.
Had BCH acted as a transactional currency instead of another fixed supply bitcoin with larger blocks, Ver could have realized the use adoption he envisioned. The elephant in the crypto room that Ver doesn’t understand is that with its fixed supply, BCH is no different than BTC. Large blocks do not change this monetary dynamic. Fixed supply can only act as a speculative asset, and demand determines its price. BCH became unburdened by what has been in terms of Bitcoin’s small blocks. Yet, its market cap—a reflection of its demand—is a fraction of BTC. It’s even worse for BSV with its Teranode promise of unlimited block sizes. Today, BTC is $100,000, BCH is $530, and BSV is $65. What need is there for another fixed supply speculative asset like BCH or BSV when BTC has already fulfilled that role in spades?
Ver cites the Austrian School of Economics and his mentor Murray Rothbard for understanding Bitcoin’s economic potential. Rothbard proposed a 100 percent gold dollar, meaning gold is the only money4. No modern economy has ever attempted a 100 percent gold dollar because it’s unworkable. A currency has to expand with growth without limitation, or it’s deflationary. With its supply a fraction of gold’s, bitcoin is just Rothbard’s 100 percent gold dollar taken to a far more unworkable extreme.
Ver’s vision was to fork it, expand block size, and they would come. Ver believed once Bitcoin became uninhibited by small blocks, and became “a network that if allowed to scale, could comprise of billions of people,” BCH would finally realize Satoshi’s vision. It didn’t happen, and why it didn’t happen is the true untold story of Hijacking Bitcoin.
I recommend Hijacking Bitcoin for its informative Bitcoin history. Ver has been intimately involved since its beginning and knows all the players. Ver describes the personalities involved, Bitcoin’s evolution, and the war after Satoshi left and ceded Bitcoin governance to others. He writes a chapter describing Lightning, Bitcoin Core’s layer 2 off-chain solution for transactions, and why it will never work. There is plenty of detail on the inner workings of the Bitcoin protocol for one wanting to know more about Bitcoin.
Ver makes clear that involvement at the core level of Bitcoin is a nasty business. It’s a history of developer intrigue, DDoS attacks on opponents, defamation, character assassination, reputation ruin, personal lawfare, failed negotiation and agreement for promised solutions, and alleged intelligence agency capture. In a recent Tucker Carlson interview, Ver mentions the CIA’s interest in early Bitcoin and links his arrest in Spain to the publication of Hijacking Bitcoin.
Despite his arrest, legal status limbo, and BCH’s limited adoption relative to BTC, Ver continues his quixotic quest tilting at crypto windmills. Amid the chaos of his long Bitcoin involvement and his legal status jeopardy, Ver has lost none of his “Bitcoin Jesus” evangelical fervor.
- For clarity, capitalized Bitcoin refers to the open-source protocol that creates the proof of work blockchain. Lowercase bitcoin refers to the currency mined by the protocol. Ver refers to Bitcoin as Bitcoin Core. Each fork of Bitcoin creates a new currency symbol. BTC-Bitcoin Core, BCH-Bitcoin Cash, BSV-Bitcoin Satoshi Vision.
- Segregated Witness (SegWit) is a protocol upgrade that removes signature data from the main block and stores it off-chain. Technically, SegWit increased BTC block size from 1MB to 4MB.
- There have been other hard forks of Bitcoin. Some have disappeared, and others remain less well-known in their impact. The two main hard forks relevant to the continuing Bitcoin story are BCH and BSV.
- Gold has a thousands-year history that established its large stock to flow—all the gold ever mined relative to its annual production. Because of gold’s large stock and historical annual production (flow) of 2 percent a year, gold’s value remains stable. Gold acts as a unit of account, a monetary standard of reference for stable value. Gold also acts as a store of value and a limited means of exchange. Its physical properties are not optimized as a currency, but any currency linked to gold at a fixed price maintains the same value as gold. A linked currency can expand with economic growth as required to always maintain the same value as gold. With its tiny stock of 21 million (less an estimated 3 million lost bitcoin) and declining flow that reduces toward zero with each halving, bitcoin can never achieve stability of value. For this reason, it’s ridiculous to consider any fixed supply bitcoin as a transactional currency regardless of block size. That is why Saylor’s view of bitcoin as digital capital has replaced Satoshi’s stated vision of a peer-to-peer electronic cash system.