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Why the Intel Agencies Want to Track Your Every Transaction and Throw Roger Ver in Jail for Life

Roger Ver is facing life in prison for revealing how the US government worked secretly to subvert cryptocurrency and prevent economic freedom. More people should hear this story. Watch the 35 minute video and then sign the petition!

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Tucker [00:00:00] Roger, thanks a lot for joining us. So here's how I understood your story. This is what I read. You are being extradited from Spain, an ally in Western Europe, a native country to the United States by the US Justice Department to face a life in prison. 109 years for tax evasion. You're not a U.S. citizen. The period that you're being charged with evading American taxes, you are not a U.S. citizen. 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. Maybe there's something more to this story. Could there be another reason the US government is angry at you and wants to put you in prison for the rest of your life?

Roger Ver [00:00:48] Yeah, to be honest, I think they're not really angry about taxes at all. I think they're just angry about my lack of obedience and lack of, you know, kissing that ring. 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. And I was promoting it since 2011 as, Hey, stop using the U.S. dollar. Stop using Euro. Stop using in, start using Bitcoin. 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. 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. So of course, they didn't like that at all. 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. So in 2014, I renounced my U.S. citizenship and became a, you know, citizen of the world effectively. But my new nationality is St Kitts, which is a wonderful little island in the Caribbean. And I thought that that would be safe for me and I could promote Bitcoin from from there and obey, even though I may disagree with plenty of laws. I do my best to obey them because I know when you're and advocating for things that change the world. Governments don't like that and they can come after you. 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. And more than a decade after I had already renounced by 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 to 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 in the euro and the yen for use as currency around the world. Suddenly, right after my book gets published, that exposes how people claiming to work for intelligence agencies to hijack Bitcoin. To do that, suddenly I get arrested and tossed in jail in Spain and tried to be extradited to face more than 100 years in prison. I'm 45 today. I think my odds of being alive with conventional technology in 109 years from now aren't looking too good. 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. 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. And so they're furious at me for trying to have something that can compete with the U.S. dollar as the world's a medium of exchange and currency.

Tucker [00:03:11] Now, I should just add an editorial comment. I mean, I you know, as an I am an American citizen and will remain one, I hope. So I'm I'm not against the US dollar in principle. It's the the mismanagement of the US dollar I think by the people in charge of it. The US government, the Federal Reserve has made it kind of a sketchy proposition. Long term. It's like their mismanagement has forced people to think about alternatives. And one of the most promising alternatives was Bitcoin. 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, to have, as you said, control over their own money, autonomy. And it has become instead this asset class. And I'm very interested in how exactly that happened. And so if you wouldn't mind explaining the thesis of your book, what you saw, how that happened. You say subterfuge by the intelligences played a role. I'll stop talking and let you explain what you saw.

Roger Ver [00:04:15] Yeah, I think to get started on that, we'll have to back up. More than 25 years ago. So when I was a very young man, I ran for political office as a libertarian in California and are called for, you know, lower taxes, less government in every area and everywhere. And this was in the year 2000. 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 was, you know, a bunch of adults, but a bunch of kids, some of them, you know, three or 4 or 5 years old, like little kids. And even if the parents were religious nuts, the ATF and FBI literally burnt to death. Everybody in their their home, their and then posed for photos on top of the corpses of little kids. And that sort of thing is not okay. And the FBI and ATF are a bunch of murderers for murdering kids. And even if the parents are, you know, doing something illegal, you don't murder the kids over that. And that's exactly what they did. And so in the debate with the Republican the Democratic candidates, I called the ATF a bunch of murderers that they are for having done that. And boy, did they not like that. I was a 21 year old kid. They had 7 or 8 employees. My business was starting to take off and I wound up being the only person in the entire world to be prosecuted for selling a firecracker on eBay, even though tons of other resellers were selling it. Cabela's sporting Goods catalog was selling it. These were being sold all over the place. I was literally the only person in the entire history of the world to be prosecuted for selling those without a permit. And it wasn't about the fact that I sold them without a permit. It was they were mad about the things that I had said. And they even said as much in one of the discussions with my attorneys and the prosecutors and the ATF agents, the ATF agent, literally at one point he pounded his hand on the table, said, you didn't hear the things that he said, referring to me, calling the murderers for littering. And if if you burn to death a bunch of kids, you're a murderer. And that's exactly what they did. And so I wound up actually signing a plea deal to do ten months in federal prison. 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 7 or 8 years in prison. And so at that point, I no longer felt safe in the U.S. I had been, you know, politically persecuted already. And so literally, the day I was allowed to leave the U.S., I left. But the way I became a libertarian, I wasn't born a libertarian. I started somehow I found a book by looking about me first and then, you know, found some Milton Friedman and then later David Friedman. And then Murray Rothbard is the author that really changed my life and was just music to my ears recently hearing a man lay down in Argentina talking about how Murray Rothbard was also one of the economists that influenced his life the most. And I want to urge anybody pick up anything by Murray Rothbard. It'll change your entire view of the world. But in these books on economics, I learned about the origin of money and how something comes to be used as money, and it has to be durable, easily divisible, has to be portable, it has to be easily recognizable. It has to be difficult to counterfeit, as have these certain characteristics that make it usable as money. And so I read these economics books. I thought, okay, that makes sense. That sounds plausible. But then when I went to federal prison, inside prison, everybody's using things as money. Everybody's buying and selling things with each other. And the things they're using are tobacco, postage stamps and top ramen soups. And if you think about it, all those things have those characteristics. They're easily transportable, they're durable, they're easily recognizable. They all have some additional use case, right? You can mail letter, you can eat the soup, you can smoke the tobacco and all of those things just naturally without any order from a guard or any inmate or anybody. They just naturally come to be used as money. And so then we fast forward to more than a decade later there Bitcoin came along and I had the theoretical knowledge from from the books that I had read, and I had the practical experience from my time in prison. There was no doubt in my mind whatsoever that people were going to start using Bitcoin as money. And so I thought, this is every Libertarians dream come true Suddenly now we're going to have a choice. And I'm not against the US dollar or the yen or the euro. I'm pro-choice. I think people should be able to choose what form of money they want to use and whether it's the dollar, the euro or the yen or Bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency out there. I think people do. Reserve the right to have that choice, and I want to see that enabled. And so when Bitcoin came along, the first step was for me to buy a bunch of Bitcoin. I bought my first Bitcoin when they were less than a dollar each. And then my business became the first established business in the entire world to start accepting Bitcoin for payments and we started advertising. Will we accept Bitcoin? Not a single customer paid us initially in Bitcoin, but it got worldwide media attention for the first time. And I remember it was in June of 2011 and in the course of two, maybe three weeks the price of Bitcoin went from around $3 a Bitcoin to $30 a Bitcoin. And that was the first time in the history of Bitcoin up to that point in which it started to get some worldwide media attention. And what an interesting thing happened for the main discussion forum where everybody up to that point was talking about Bitcoin was a website called Bitcoin talk.org. And suddenly when it was getting some media attention around the world and international newspapers, this forum that had worked wonderfully up to that point where people could discuss things became flooded with bots just posting comments that were just you know, fluff and made literally. They did ask the forum to the point that it was unusable. And anybody that came there because they heard about bitcoin in the media that week, they they weren't able to learn about it because there's just so many posts saying, you know, buy, sell or no and just just say nothing of any substance whatsoever. So 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're asking different Bitcoin developers to, 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 by shutting down the forum effectively when so many new people were coming to Bitcoin to learn about it for the first time. And in the early days, everybody knew that Bitcoin was supposed to be money for the world. Bitcoin was supposed to be used for payments as peer to peer cash for the world. And that's how people were using it. And, you know, I was doing payroll in it and I was paying my suppliers overseas. I hosted the first Bitcoin meetup ever in China about it. Like I was really doing my best to spread this all over the world, including, you know, paying for national radio ads for it. Like it was really, really spreading. But then later in, I believe, 2012, a person using the name John Dillon, who claimed to work for intelligence, spent more than $10,000, I forget the exact amount, but a significant sum of money to start producing propaganda to trick people into thinking that by keeping the blocks on bitcoin small, it would make it more decentralized. And literally the exact opposite of the truth. The exact opposite of the way Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, designed it and promoted it. And the exact opposite of the way that people were using it. And nobody believed the propaganda initially. But then later this giant wave of censorship took place. Anonymous people that nobody knows their real names managed to get control of all the main discussion platforms for Bitcoin. And then suddenly one day overnight, nobody was even allowed to advocate for Bitcoin being used as money. And they they censored anybody that tried to do that. And initially everybody saw through it. But then everybody that came to Bitcoin after the censorship began, they just started believing it. And and today the main people that are out there promoting Bitcoin, they literally say, Bitcoin shouldn't compete with the US dollar. Bitcoin. You shouldn't use it as money, you shouldn't use it to pay for things like Bitcoin is just a digital asset. You should just hold it. And it's the exact opposite. They threw the censorship and the propaganda. They've literally hijacked bitcoin and I literally wrote an entire book about it. You can find more hijacking Bitcoin.com. It's available on Amazon and everywhere else. And lo and behold, just a couple of weeks after the book, the book is published, I get arrested. And now I'm facing 109 years in federal prison for having exposed the way in which Bitcoin was hijacked. And you can you can think all day long that the new version of Bitcoin that that people are promoting is better. Okay. But you can't admit that it wasn't hijacked. And luckily now we have thousands of different cryptocurrencies and I support competition and I'm not I was never a Bitcoin maximalist or any other cryptocurrency maximalist. I'm a utilitarian freedom maximalist whatever gives the most utility and is the most useful for the most people around the world to improve their lives and create more economic freedom that leads to more economic growth. That's what I want to be out there and promote to the world.

Tucker [00:12:17] So a bunch of questions, but let's just begin with the core promise of Bitcoin, as we both remember vividly was that I would be able to conduct transactions by goods and services privately without federal control, that there was there was anonymity because it was digital and I could sort of have freedom in the things that I bought. Well, how exactly did they control conversation about that? You say that they censored the the discussion boards. Can you explain exactly how that works?

Roger Ver [00:12:56] So there are two main discussion platforms for everybody was talking about bitcoin and that one was called Bitcoin talk.org. And then another was how are Bitcoin on Reddit? And everybody was busy talking about Bitcoin in those places and the same anonymous individual managed to get moderator ship position or ownership of both of those forums. And one day he decided to turn on the censorship and they would ban anybody. They would state anything that wasn't wasn't in line with the small blocks propaganda about Bitcoin. And when the censorship first began, people started a thread on Reddit complaining about the censorship. At that point, it was the most upvoted thread ever in the entire history of that Bitcoin subreddit. And what did they do? They then deleted that post as well and banned the people that were participating in that post. And this issue still goes on to this very day. If you go on our Bitcoin or Bitcoin talk at all and post anything in favor of Bitcoin being able to scale to be money for the world, they will ban your account. And it's really, really a shame. So the average person that's involved in bitcoin today, they just see, the price is about $100,000 each. And and Michael Saylor is talking about, you know, pay your taxes and don't. Don't be inflammatory. Don't compete with the US dollar. That's going to make Visa, Mastercard and the government angry. Don't do any of that. He's saying literally the exact opposite of what everybody was saying. The beginning of Bitcoin, which is like this finally gives people a choice as to what form of money they want to use. And so imagine if everybody was using Bitcoin as money in commerce to, you know, do their payroll and buy things online and pay for everything. How would the U.S. government be able to give billions and billions of dollars to Ukraine when most people don't want that to happen? How would they be able to spend billions and billions of dollars, all these foreign wars that most people don't want to be able to have happen? They wouldn't be able to just inflate it out of thin air. Suddenly, government would be much, much more accountable to the people. And, you know, they teach everybody in school, government, you know, government works for the people. Well, if people are using hard as a cryptocurrency, as money in everyday life, government really would have to be much more accountable to the people than they are today. And that's why government doesn't want that. So that's why they've been doing everything they can to subvert Bitcoin and prevent people from being able to use cryptocurrencies as money in daily life, whether it's from tax policy or tax reporting or exit taxes or anything else. They're making it as difficult as possible. In fact, even even the people that are in the studio here that we're recording this with, I offered to pay them in cryptocurrency. The reason they didn't want it is because they're scared of the tax ramifications around it, because government's going to lose control of the money supply. And if they lose control of the money supply, they lose control of most of their control of society. But if you believe in individual rights and individual freedom and people being in charge of their own destiny, it's a wonderful thing when government loses the ability to control people's lives. And that's why I'm so excited about Bitcoin. I've been involved almost 15 years and I've been promoting cryptocurrencies as currency for people worldwide. Whether you're, you know, stuck in Spain awaiting extradition or in the U.S. or or anywhere else on the planet. Cryptocurrencies is for everybody and they need to go head to head and compete with the US dollar and the euro and the yen and the ruble and everything else. Because when people have more choices, their lives are better off and it results in more economic freedom, more economic freedom results, more economic growth and more economic growth raises everybody's standard of living, which literally makes every single person's life on the planet a better off. And that's why it's such an exciting thing for me to be involved in, and that's why I'm doing it. Despite risking 109 years in federal prison for just telling people about these are amazing ideas and technologies.

Tucker [00:16:11] So the original promise was Bitcoin will make you free. And then it became quickly to some version. Bitcoin will make you rich. And that was enough to kind of derail the promise. I should note that you are rich from Bitcoin. I mean, and you could very easily kind of not say anything and just be happily rich with Bitcoin because you bought a lot of it early. And so it sounds like your ideological commitment is overriding your financial interests.

Roger Ver [00:16:39] It's not not even close to me. So like, I was a multi-millionaire before Bitcoin had ever even been invented. I had my own tech companies in Silicon Valley that had done very well for me. Lots of people talk about a win win Lambo and I'm just on my bitcoin to buy Lambo. I had had multiple Lamborghinis before Bitcoin had ever even been invented. When Bitcoin came along, I was such a big believer in Bitcoin that I sold my Lamborghini to buy more Bitcoin. That's how excited I was about this philosophically and emotionally and intellectually, because this is literally one of the best tools the world has ever seen to give individuals more control over their own lives. And so I was headed in the exact opposite direction of most of the people who are involved in Bitcoin today. I was selling things to buy more Bitcoin because I knew this was going to become money for the world. And today maybe it'll be Bitcoin, maybe it'll be a different cryptocurrency. But cryptocurrencies are still certainly the the way of the future and have them. And remember today it's 2024. When Bitcoin first came out, there was no Applepay, there was no Zelle, there was barely any This thing like there was almost no competition. But governments successfully delayed the adoption of cryptocurrencies so that now suddenly the traditional financial systems had a chance to catch up and get a lot more done. And and it's just really, really frustrating because life is short as, as, as anybody, you know, as each year goes by, they go by faster and faster and there's less and less about each other like. Spence left. We need the benefits brought by cryptocurrency as soon as possible, and we know all the benefits for the world as soon as possible. Let's not waste time yet. That's exactly what governments around the world have been doing. They've been delaying and hindering the adoption of cryptocurrency as money, which is literally delaying the progress of all of humankind and all of human society. And it's really frustrating to see that happen.

Tucker [00:18:16] The most frustrating part from my perspective is the inability to use cryptocurrency, apparently with any privacy. I mean, that that is the core promise. I'll be I earned the money, didn't do anything wrong, and I would like to buy something that's sort of no one's business whether I'm buying it or not. And I would like to do that in privacy. I don't think that's a weird thing to want. It's a human thing to want. And is that possible? Here's my question is, is it now possible to conduct any kind of business with crypto anonymously?

Roger Ver [00:18:49] So in the early days, everybody thought Bitcoin was basically anonymous and people treated it that way. And then websites came up that were selling things that governments might not necessarily want you to buy. And people were using Bitcoin for that because they thought it was basically anonymous. And then later on we found out that it wasn't anonymous at all. But additional steps were taken to make Bitcoin even less anonymous. And today most people are just using custodial wallets, which are, you know, it's not even a wallet, it's just an account. And it's no more private than your, you know, Bank of America or PayPal account. And in fact, it's even less private than those things because anybody can take a look at the blockchain and see what's there. But luckily, there's other cryptocurrencies out there that do give people more privacy. So there's things like Monero, which most people are now using if they want some privacy. But there's even more exciting technologies and coins out there. There's another one called Xeno that allows anybody to create their own privacy token in which nobody can see what's going on. And if you really want to get there, the three that are agencies, etc., government subset, there's a project called Confidential Layer, which is creating a bridge from Bitcoin, Bitcoin cash and a theorem onto Zeno. So you can take Bitcoin with no privacy at all, or a theory with no privacy at all and bridge it permission honestly, with no custodian and no central point of attack onto Zeno. And when it's on Zeno, you have very, very strong privacy with that as well. And so I think that's going to make a whole lot more privacy come to the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem. But governments are going to hate that. Like a Monero that I mentioned before, it's preemptively banned from being listed on most exchanges in most of the world at this point. And that's be simply because governments have much less of an ability to spy on people that are using things like Monero or Zeno. And that's why I'm a big fan of things like Monero or saying no today. And in fact, today I would be embarrassed to promote I am embarrassed to promote Bitcoin to people today because the transactions are slow, expensive, unreliable, and you have no privacy. I'd be proud to promote something like a Monero or a Zeno or Zcash or Z coin or any of these privacy tools out there, because those are the ones that provide more individual control to people in more privacy and more economic freedom to people over the world. People are claiming that Bitcoin is freedom money, but I'm really afraid that they're literally building the financial prison walls around themselves. Like if you look at what's going on in El Salvador, everybody's excited about bitcoin there, but they're all using custodial accounts that the government can see every single transaction you're making and they can freeze your account at any time. That's the exact opposite of economic freedom. That's economic government control. And so anybody that's paying attention should be really, really concerned about this. And they should be advocating the use of cryptocurrencies in which individuals can actually have control of their own money and have control over their own lives, their own destiny and. Maybe that'll be Bitcoin thanks to this new technology called confidential layer that bridges it on to Zeno. But and I don't know what it's going to be, but like, we need to be really, really careful because, you know, it could wind up that we've before we know it before we realize that we've built the financial prison walls around us. And it's too late to get out. Too late to escape. So let's let's be aware of this today. And and and, you know, watch out.

Tucker [00:21:41] A lot of people in the crypto world, I think are admirable people. I'm friends with some of them. When you mention actually people I like and admire and largely agree with. But I'm a little bit confused as to why you're the only person I've ever heard say what you just said. Why are the people promoting various cryptocurrencies also sounding the alarm that none of the transactions you conduct using these currencies are private. In fact, they're very easily trackable by government. Why is nobody saying that?

Roger Ver [00:22:07] Because the censorship and propaganda works. Lots of people are saying that, but very few people other than myself have a big enough platform or a loud enough voice to get much attention. And because I had such a big platform and big voice, boom, suddenly I'm looking at 109 years in prison. I don't think that's a coincidence at all. And again, if the solution to ideas or people saying things that you don't agree with is more debate and more discussion and more free speech, where's the most the people promoting Bitcoin at this point? They've taken the exact opposite. There have been supporting the propaganda and the censorship, which, you know, I'm on the exact opposite. In fact, initially when the debate started happening as to what should be the proper scaling method for Bitcoin, my heart was already on what was called like the big block side, but I want it to be open to the other arguments. And so I was just quiet and started listening. And as I tried to listen, suddenly one side started to try and censor the other side and I already knew I was on the side of free speech. And so as soon as one side tried to censor the other side, I knew, okay, it's time for me to speak up. Now I'm on the side of free speech and I'm on the side of Bitcoin. Being able to scale in the original way that that, you know, the Bitcoin whitepaper described as peer to peer cash for the entire world, that's very different than just this speculative asset. And everyone today is excited. Bitcoin is about almost $100,000. Maybe it would have been $100,000 half a decade ago if it hadn't been hijacked and hadn't been destroyed in its usefulness for the world. So you need to look at what's seen and what's not seen and what we see today. Okay, it's close to a hundred thousand. Not what's not seen as what it could have been if companies like Microsoft and Expedia and these other big companies around the world didn't have to stop accepting Bitcoin because of its slow transaction fees, slow transaction times and unreliable transactions and lack of privacy as well. So it's really disappointing. But thank you for giving me a platform to help sound the alarm because I don't want to see the entire world wind up imprisoning themselves inside of some sort of a, you know, financial position that they're building, even if it has a cool sounding name like Bitcoin.

Tucker [00:24:00] Who is Satoshi?

Roger Ver [00:24:02] I don't know. And if anybody knows, I'm not aware of that. But whoever he is or wherever he is, he literally invented one of the most important things in the entire history of humankind out there on par with how important the invention of electricity or the transistor or the Internet was. It really is one of the most world changing technologies ever. And so whoever he is, wherever he is or they are or she is, they deserve their privacy because clearly that that's what they want.

Tucker [00:24:26] So it doesn't sound like you're suspicious that Bitcoin was created by the Intel agencies as a way as a kind of trap for people.

Roger Ver [00:24:36] I don't I don't think it was created that way initially. But I am suspicious. And I do think that the Intel agencies and other groups have converted it and hijacked it into becoming a financial trap.

Tucker [00:24:47] I just want to apologize. But we were we were or I was laughing off camera saying, you're such and you're so great and explaining this. No wonder they want to put you in prison. I shouldn't have laughed at that is sort of an awful thing to say because they actually are trying to put you in prison. And so rather than making fun of something so awful, I would love to know if you think you're actually going to go to prison. I mean, is there any way to stop this?

Roger Ver [00:25:11] Yeah, there's a lot of ways to stop this, but the most useful way, I think, is to get the public to speak out, right? Like the more people that speak out, the safer all of us can be. And so one of the most egregious things here, too, is like. The IRS with guns on their hip. They literally showed up at my attorney's office and my accounts after they raided my attorney's office. Right. You're not supposed to be able to do that in the U.S. like you're supposed to be able to to talk to your attorneys and that supposed to be private. And so all the information is available over at a website that supporters set up at Free Roger now.org. They recently filed what's called a motion to dismiss where you can literally see for your with your own eyes that the U.S. government is literally lying in their indictment. And the proof is up there with the emails between myself, my attorneys. You can go and see I please go take a look at don't take my word for it. Like take a look at that motion to dismiss. They're lying. They're lying to the court in Spain. They're just lying every which way because they don't want the world to know the truth about cryptocurrencies, that they can be used to empower individuals to have control over their own lives beyond the control of, you know, politicians who have never met you and they don't know about you and your life, and most of them don't care about you one bit. So like the fact that now people anywhere on the planet have access to money that they can use to escape inflation or they can use it to escape other, you know, a precautionary tactics. Cryptocurrency is an amazing, amazing tool for freedom around the world. And governments are the opposite of freedom. They don't like people having more freedom, and that's why they don't like cryptocurrency and that's why they're they're trying to shut me up. I, I wish I had even more hard proof, but I don't think it's a coincidence. They arrested me as soon as my book came out and I was about to go on a big media tour promoting the fact that Bitcoin has been hijacked and suddenly they have me arrested and tossed in a jail for a month in a in Barcelona. And they were furious that I got out on bail. But this is the first media interview I've done since I've been out. I've been out over six months now. This is a really, really big deal for the entire world. This isn't just an American thing. This is literally affects every single person on the planet. And it's like another example of us, you know, Apple, people all over the world, these iPhones. Apple's an American company, but it affects every single person on the planet. Every year, new Apple products come out. People all over the planet that aren't Americans also get to benefit from it. Americans get to benefit from it. Everybody gets to benefit from it. It's the same with cryptocurrencies. Everybody on the planet, even if it's somebody working on it in the US or Spain or somewhere else, everybody on the planet gets to benefit from it. And, and you know, and buy benefit from it. I mean, they get to have more control over their own lives, their own finances, their own financial sovereignty. Governments hate that. That's why they're trying to stop it. And that's why they don't want you to read hijacking bitcoins. You can hear with, you know, citations for everything how Bitcoin was hijacked and people are promoting it today is literally the exact opposite of what it started out as.

Tucker [00:27:46] I'm a little bit surprised that the government of Spain is honoring the extradition request. I mean, the US government just sent $100 billion to Ukraine without an audit to the most corrupt country in Europe. $100 billion didn't even bother to audit it, you know, and a huge percentage is being stolen. We know that they don't care. So the idea the US government is so upset that you and non citizen didn't pay us taxes, which you're not even obligated to pay, is like absurd on its face. How did the Spanish government participate in what's obviously a grotesque miscarriage of justice? Why would they play along with that?

Roger Ver [00:28:23] If I can interject, not only are they mad about the taxes, I wasn't an American and I wasn't living in the U.S., Right. This is like it's so crazy. I was not American not living in the US and they're claiming I owe the more U.S. taxes on the Bitcoin. Like it's just absolute insanity. But if you look at it when there's a political persecution, they just have to make stuff up so they can grab the people. And the most common way they do it is they use the government tax code because it's so incredibly complicated. Even people that want to comply with every last little detail and how the best professionals like I did myself, it's it it's too complicated. There's they can get you if they want you. And that's what they do time and time again. And so in regards to the Spanish government, I have an amazing attorney here, Jaime Company here. I'm really hoping that he's going to be successful here. He's optimistic about the whole situation. But you don't know. And it's a really terrifying way to live day to day. If I win and Spain decides not to extradite me, they'll send me or my attorney a letter and say, congratulations, you're not going to be extradited if I lose and they decide to extradite me, they don't tell me in advance. They'll just be a knock at my door one morning and they'll they'll grab me and they'll put me in jail and I'll have zero notice whatsoever. I won't. Won't be able to return the rental car or tell the landlord or anything else to literally just come to my house. Grabbed me one morning and I won't know in advance which morning it's going to be and I'll just happen one morning. And so it's not a fun way to live day to day knowing if this is your last day, you know, not in prison potentially for the rest of your entire life. And so but I'm I'm cautiously optimistic that Spain will be able to see through this and see what a politically motivated persecution this is by a by a bunch of people that are just, you know, jealous. Like if I hadn't been treated so unfairly politically the last time around when I ran for political office and tried to change the system, then I'd still be, you know, a proud flag waving American today. And I still the values in my heart are still some of the most American values there are. And if you think about it, people say, you renounced your US citizen, you know, ship that's not very patriotic. Are you kidding? That's exactly the values that America was founded on. It was a bunch of British people that were announced their citizenship and said, I don't like laws. You guys are passing. I'm not going to be a part of this anymore. So renouncing your citizenship is actually one of the. Most patriotic Americans ask things you can possibly do. And I hope the Spanish government will be able to see, like I've been out there, you know, speaking out to the world about the benefits of cryptocurrency. The US government has the most to lose because the dollar's the world's reserve currency, so they like it less than even other governments. This is clearly a politically motivated persecution. And my, my, my, my faith and hope and, you know, my my dreams are with the Spanish government to not extradite me at this point. And I hope they do the right thing and they can see what's going on. But I also, you know, have maybe I can beat the whole thing at trial as well. But, you know, you never know. You're rolling the dice there, even though I'm completely innocent. But we also could have the the Department of Justice now just drop all the charges because it's completely I'm completely innocent. And we literally fought this thing all the way to the Supreme Court in regards to my attorney client privilege documents, when they finally, finally got access to those documents, they were probably mad because it was me literally telling my attorneys, do everything perfectly, do everything perfectly. I don't want to have any problems. And so they had a big giant let down. So there was a Supreme Court case in regards to myself. People need to understand how insane it is that the IRS raided my a tax attorney at their office. How can you raid someone's attorney's office to violate attorney client privilege in the US? That's the stuff that all the US propaganda wants you to believe goes on in Russia all the time in other countries. But they're doing it right, you know, right there at home in where I was born and raised in the United States of America. It's insane that that's going on. So President Biden can do the right thing. He just recently, you know, pardoned his son. He can he can issue a preemptive pardon for me. Trump When he gets into office, if anybody knows what it's like to be the victim of lawfare, it's Trump. So I think you'll be able to see it in this case as well. He can issue a preemptive pardon for me as well and a bunch of other people that deserve it. I'm I'm not the only one. Right. There's a whole long list of people out there that have been the victim of lawfare. And more often than not, it's people that are engaged in something that the U.S. doesn't like politically. And if you if you rock the boat and the deep state doesn't like it, they're going to come after you. And I'm just one more in that long, long, long list of people that they've they've attacked and trying to destroy their lives.

Tucker [00:32:30] If I wasn't in this business, I wouldn't believe any of this. I wouldn't think anything you were saying was true. I've just seen it so often. It's just a specific point. Are you allowed to leave Spain or are you imprisoned by Spain? Can you or can you leave the country?

Roger Ver [00:32:44] So, no, not only can I not leave the country, I'm on an island in Spain, off the coast of Spain called Mallorca, and not even allowed to leave this island. I'm not allowed to go on a boat. I'm not allowed to do anything. And every 48 hours, I have to check in with the court and show them my ID and prove that I didn't run away. And again, any day could be my last year. If they decide they are going to extradite me, they'll just show up unannounced and arrest me here in Spain and put me back in the Spanish prison and then at some point ship me to the US prison as well. And so that's like a a pretty nerve wracking way to to live day after day here in Spain. So my Spain's a wonderful country, but I would love to be here voluntarily.

Tucker [00:33:18] What it's it's shocking that Spain can act as the jailers for the US government on transparently fake charges. What's so you already spent a month in Spanish prison. What was that like?

Roger Ver [00:33:30] My Spanish is certainly better than it was before that happened.

Tucker [00:33:33] I bet you, you know, prison slang. Yeah.

Roger Ver [00:33:37] And it's actually because I'm such a, you know, clean cut, well-spoken guy. There were a couple of other people in the prison started to think, I must be some sort of an American undercover spy spying on the prison. So, like, some of the other inmates were really wary of me and didn't want to speak to me. And luckily, nobody, you know, found out who I was or what my role was in regards to cryptocurrency. But some people were suspicious of me, and I was very glad to to get out when I finally did. And the US government was very angry that they granted bail here in Spain. They wanted to hold me in jail in Spain the entire time in a country. You know, I think this was only the second time I'd ever even visited Spain, ever. I thought I was only going to be here for four days. There was there was a cryptocurrency conference about privacy, cryptocurrencies here, about Zeno in Monaco and things like that. I thought I was just going to be here for that. And I was in the hotel lobby after the conference and some guy I didn't know came up to me with a fake Spanish accent said, Are you Rajveer? And I said, Yes. And Rajveer? Yes. And like 3 or 4 times back and forth. And when I finally convinced him that I was Roger Vere and that we had overcome the language barrier and I thought he was a crypto guy, I wanted to ask for like an autographed copy of my book or talk about crypto or something. Then he pulled out his badge and said that he has an Interpol arrest warrant. They arrested me right there in the in the lobby of the hotel in Barcelona and, you know, hauled me off to jail in Spain. And boy, was I not expecting that one bit to happen. And talk about having your world turned upside down. But it just makes me even more motivated because cryptocurrencies are such a powerful, powerful tool for every human being on the planet. How could I not be quiet about spreading this good message to everybody around the world? So congratulations, America. You made me even more motivated to spread cryptocurrency adoption to the world.

Tucker [00:35:10] That is just one of the craziest stories I think I've ever heard. Roger, Godspeed. We are just rooting for you fervently, and I hope this helps in some small way. Anyway, you're in our thoughts. Thank you.

Roger Ver [00:35:23] My pleasure, Tucker. And if I can ask people that want to show their support, please head over to Free Roger now. And I would deeply appreciate that.

Tucker [00:35:31] Thank you. Good luck.