Roger Ver Bitcoin Jesus & XinFin Advisor interviewed by Chris Neill of XinFin

Chris Neill, Head of American Development, XinFin interviewed Roger Ver, the Bitcoin Jesus and XinFin Advisor yesterday. Read on to know what Roger Ver said about XinFin.

Chris Neill: Ladies and Gentlemen, my name is Chris Neill. I am the Head of American Development for XinFin, located in Pennsylvania in the United States. I have a very rare occasion and distinct honour, someone I heavily respect and who is an advisor to XinFin, I have the face of Bitcoin Cash, the Bitcoin Jesus, Roger Ver himself and who is also an advisor to XinFin. Roger, I can’t tell you how excited I am and behalf of XinFin and our community, thanks for spending a bit of your morning and my evening. Thanks for sharing this time with us.

Roger Ver: Yeah, thank you too, Chris. Good evening to you and good morning to me and to where everyone else is around the world.

Chris Neill in conversation with Roger Ver

Chris Neill: OK, so before we rock and roll here, to everyone listening, I want to take a moment to clear Roger. There was an interview where he was asked about XinFin and he said: “I am an advisor, but as far as developments I am not really caught up to date”. But that’s not really Roger’s area of advisory, he doesn’t do the business development. So, don’t be alarmed that he’s not necessarily up to date on Ramco.

Roger Ver: But I can add to that, right before we started this recording, Chris just gave me a nice update on a lot of things going on with XinFin. I’m glad to hear that.

Chris Neill: Roger is totally updated guys, Roger is totally updated. So, this is a little bit of a different interview with Roger. Roger is normally asked a thousand questions about Bitcoin Cash, what’s hot, what's this, what’s that. But, this is actually heavily aimed towards you, the XinFin community. We are going to hear a bit about Bitcoin Cash, which is strategic questions from me to Roger, which I am going to leave it at that and not go any further. You will hear about that later.

So Roger, Bitcoin. You started out heavily, a major advocate for Bitcoin, how did you get into that? Everyone has their “this is my first coin” moment where they wake up and was like I am going in on crypto. What happened, why Bitcoin?

Roger Ver: I probably would have to attribute it to the books I was reading as a teenager in the late 90’s. If I had to pick 2, I would have to pick Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, which is a science fiction book where people were going all over the world setting up data centers and using anonymous cybercash to pay for it all that can’t be tracked or controlled by governments. It was such an exciting book and so many exciting things were happening because of the invention of this cybercash. And another book, that is actually a non-fiction book called Future Imperfect by David Friedman, son of Milton Friedman, the Nobel prize-winning economist. In that book, he described the public cheap cryptography and how people can have anonymous identities on the internet and provide services without having to be tied to the real world identities and all they need in order to make all this happen was some sort of anonymous digital cash that can work on the internet. I read about this in the late 1990’s and thought “wow the world is gonna be so exciting when we finally have this anonymous digital cash that can’t be controlled or censored or tracked”. And, then I had to wait, I had to wait, I had to wait, over a decade I had to wait. Then when finally heard about Bitcoin for the first time, I thoughts “YES! It’s finally here, this anonymous cyber digital cash I have been reading about in science fiction books, it’s finally here!” and it’s called Bitcoin. Turns out it’s not nearly as anonymous as we thought initially in the beginning. But, there are some other currencies that have much greater levels of privacies and some privacy tools are being built on top of Bitcoin Cash at this point as well. It felt like the stuff I had read about in science fictions books were finally true. It’s still so exciting.

Chris Neill: That makes sense, that makes sense, that’s similar to how I got into this. I have a heavy investment background. I used to do a lot of ForEx trading, and I still do just not as much. I am heavily committed to XinFin. When you get into ForEx trading and you understand how banks work, how bonds works and all that then Trade and Finance makes sense. But having a management background and investment background, I see the flaws and I can see where it can improve. And, kind of the same thing you were talking about with Friedman and all them, it really makes sense on an individual level but what if the freedoms and absolute control was put in the hands of business owners without the governments getting in the way. So, that makes perfect sense, that makes perfect sense.

So on that note then, Why XinFin? You only advise a handful, like 5, 6 maybe 7 and correct me if I’m wrong, different companies and you get asked all the time. Why XinFin, at what point were you like, this is where I am going in?

Roger Ver: Yeah, you guys had approached me initially, we did some background checks and due diligence and uh, looked into you guys and you guys made the cut. It seemed like an actual product that was actually gonna have something that could potentially go somewhere. So, thank you and congratulations to both of us.

Chris Neill: So it was, and if I could put this into words for people listening. So the team, when you did the background check, was it the actual experience of the team or was it the experience of the team plus its the first of its kind hybrid blockchain and they are going all in on trade and finance. Was that any type of influence?

Roger Ver: So I have a team at Bitcoin.com that reviews all the ICO’s and different startups that approach us every single day, my right-hand man Mate Tokay, the COO, maybe you spoke with him as well, he looked at you guys and came back and said yeah, this one is ok, this is good.

Chris Neill: When I was in New York at Consensus I ran into Mate and I hope I pronounced that right because…

Roger Ver: Everyone thinks its pronounced Mate, like he’s Australian or something but he is actually Hungarian and its pronounced “Mah-tey”, not “Mate”.

Chris Neill: Yeah, that was my second guess and my first guess. Yeah, I had run into him and I took a quick video with him. I caught him off guard and he was like, “oh, hey this short white guy, that’s cool”.

Alright cool, so my big thing, I love Bitcoin Cash, what’s hot with Bitcoin Cash, and to the XinFin community, you’ll really wanna hear this because we ask with strategic intent, so. What keeps you up at night with Bitcoin Cash? Is there something going on and you are just like oh my god this is so exciting and I should be asleep but now its 3 o’clock in the morning. What’s hot with BCH right now?

Roger Ver: Yeah, so I’m so excited about it for the same reason, I got excited about Bitcoin in 2011 and became the world’s first investor in Bitcoin startups because Bitcoin Cash allows you to send and receive any amount of money with anyone, anywhere instantly in the world basically for free. I’ve been saying that same little speech since 2011. That same speech is completely true about Bitcoin Cash today. It’s no longer true BTC. And, the really frustrating part about it, that it’s not true about BTC anymore by the intentions of a lot of these BTC supporters. They mock the idea of using it as money or mock the idea of using it as cash even though it is right there in the very title of the original Bitcoin white papers as peer to peer electronic cash system. Well, if it’s not usable as a cash system it’s not very exciting or interesting to me. So uh, Bitcoin Cash is really exciting and if anyone is on the fence, try using both, see what the fees are for both and the delay, the transaction delays are or both and it’s clear that Bitcoin Cash is better money than Bitcoin Core at this point.

Chris Neill: Bitcoin Core (laughs)

Roger Ver: Yeah, as Warren Buffet would say, “be greedy when others are fearful and be fearful when others are greedy” and right now a lot of people seem to be fearful of the future of Bitcoin Cash so now is the best time to buy. Buy more and right now my money is going to Bitcoin Cash right now because it works as money.

Chris Neill: Actually that’s interesting, because earlier in the year with the boom, Bitcoin was a big thing and people all around the world were finally being introduced to Bitcoin and the entire world of cryptocurrency, and so Bitcoin was all over the place and don’t get me wrong Bitcoin cash had some volatility, but the level of impact with Bitcoin Cash wasn’t near the dominance of BTC. So, it looked as if it provided a level of security as far as volatility, especially from an institutional standpoint when they want to protect that they are using something digital versus fiat. So, the level of volatility wasn’t there with Bitcoin Cash as much, near at all as it was with Bitcoin so there is this fear with Bitcoin holders, that let’s say 2 years down the road people are anticipating a huge bump, huge pump, whether it comes I don’t know, but there is this fear that Bitcoin is now going to become more of a collector’s item while Bitcoin Cash takes off and is actually just used on a grand level. You know what I mean.

Roger Ver: To be fair, I think both have had a lot of volatility. BTC has the Bitcoin name and is viewed as Bitcoin by the public. It only has the name, it doesn’t have any of the characteristics that Bitcoin had from 2009 all the way up to July 2015 or 2016. So, the one that has the same characteristics that made Bitcoin popular to begin with is Bitcoin Cash.

Chris Neill: The vision behind it all.

Roger Ver: Fast, cheap and reliable payments. BTC doesn’t have it, BCH does.

Chris Neill: So moving on to payments, Fusex, that card, please elaborate, how did that come to be? They just knock on your door one day?

Roger Ver: So I was in Korea, like a week or 2 ago and they are a great company and anyone who doesn’t know what Fusex is, its a debit that you can use anywhere that accepts visa. But, it will instantly debit your cryptocurrency at the time of the sale. So you don’t have to convert your cryptocurrency back to fiat in advance. You just do it at the time you make the purchase. So, they contacted me wanting me to be an advisor for their group as well. I thought, of course, there’s a huge demand of people who want to use their crypto everywhere and the easy way to do that is to connect to the existing credit card network. I told them, if you look at the BTC supporters today out there, they are openly hostile to BTC being used as money whereas Bitcoin Cash transactions are fast, cheap and reliable. The Bitcoin Cash community, which is basically the ones that built BTC into what it is today. All of us are wanting to use Bitcoin Cash as cash so I told them, you ought to just drop BTC from your platform completely and put BCH in there instead, and the reason you should do that is because the BCH people want to use your platform and the BTC supporters are gonna howl, moan and complain and scream on the internet about it, the fact that you guys dropped it but they weren’t gonna use your platform anyhow because they don’t actually spend their BTC, they don’t spend it as money, they think it’s a magical store of value that can go up and doesn’t have any other use case other than being a store of value. It’s absolute economic fairytale nonsense stuff. All the people that have any understanding of economics have left BTC and are adopting other coins like Bitcoin Cash. So, they thought about it and it didn’t take very long either and they said, “Roger, you’re right”. They put together a big press release and dropped BTC from their platform and have added Bitcoin Cash for the default currency for their Fusex card. You can look for that within this year. We’ll have a couple samples we will be using internally here at the Bitcoin.com office by the end of this month and will hopefully be on sale to the entire public, maybe September or October is the time frame for that.

Chris Neill: So literally, coffee shops are popular with crypto, so literally at a coffee shop or if I’m making a purchase with credit cards, I could use it just like a credit card payment?

Roger Ver: Chris, another fantastic example of how you could use cryptocurrencies is www.Purse.io. You can save up to 20% on every single thing at Amazon just by going to Purse.io and using your Bitcoin Cash over there and that’s an example of an old business that used to be BTC only and when the BTC crowd succeeded in making BTC useful as money, they added Bitcoin Cash across their entire platform. They started paying all their employees in Bitcoin Cash. It’s clear to anyone that wants to use digital currency as a currency, Bitcoin Cash is where it’s at.

Chris Neill: So, Jeju Island, you were their, what, a week and a half ago give or take?

Roger Ver: So this is an example of some fake news. The news media is reporting that I was in Jeju Island, I was not. I haven’t been to Jeju in several years. I was in Seoul, Korea and the Governor or Jeju Island actually requested to meet with me. So I had the meeting with the Governor in Seoul. Now, you know how the news media can get things wrong and twist things around.

Chris Neill: I live in America, let’s talk about fake news.

Roger Ver: Yeah.

Chris Neill: So on that note, because that’s all you hear about now, when I heard about Jeju, I read up on it on like 5 different media platforms and the substance of the whole story was about the $100, the Governor shouldn’t have received. I was like, forget about that, people are missing the big picture. What was the agenda and what was the takeaway? So please, talk about your meeting with the Governor.

Roger Ver: Yeah, so I met him in Korea, and uh, basically he said he wants to turn all of Jeju Island, which is kind of a, somewhat of a timeless part of Korea, it’s part of Korea but it has a larger degree of a timing where people can set their own laws and have their own policies there and he wants to turn the whole island into basically a cryptocurrency, blockchain island. So I’ll help you bring Bitcoin Cash for the whole island, and he was really excited about it. So, I didn’t just give him $100 bucks worth of Bitcoin Cash, I gave everybody in the entire room $100 worth of Bitcoin Cash. They didn’t have Bitcoin Cash wallets yet and so I wanted to show them how easy, fast, cheap and reliable the payments are and all of them were wowed, they said: “wow, look how amazing and how easy this is to use”. Like you said you know, the news media reported that I was in Jeju Island and I wasn’t but I’m going to go their probably next week or the week after, I’ll go there this month and help get the ball rolling with the Bitcoin Cash adoption across the entire island.

Chris Neill: Ok, so now that’s got me thinking, as a previous investor now working for financial technology, whether it’s Mac Materials, which we just released a PR about today, which is a company that takes new and used industrial equipment and sells it to other manufacturing companies, so whether it’s a small coffee shop or an industrial level type operation, what’s the difference and why is Bitcoin Cash so successful on the small and the large? Because we know that Bitcoin Cash has the ability to kind of bridge the gap between the lower and upper class to anyone who has done any type of research. So, what makes it so successful not only on a smaller scale but also a massive scale where you are talking about hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars in a single transaction?

Roger Ver: At the end of the day, it’s its usefulness as money. Bitcoin Cash transactions are fast, cheap and reliable. BTC transactions are slow, expensive and unreliable. So if you have two different digital currencies and one is fast, cheap and reliable and the other is slow, expensive and unreliable, you have to be a rocket scientist or an economist even to figure out which one is going to be used most by people around the world.

And, for anyone out there who is on the fence, I invite you to go to www.free.bitcoin.com, we’re giving out about 10 cents worth of Bitcoin Cash to anybody out there so visit www.free.bitcoin.com and you can see for yourself to see how fast and reliable it is. On BTC, it’s impossible to send 10 cents of BTC, it’s not even possible anymore, where with Bitcoin Cash, it’s easy it’s no problem at all and you can share with your friends too.

Chris Neill: Ok, so here is kind of a big question. Something like the Fusex card, where I just swipe my card and walk away. I can do that where I am paying off my mortgage on a monthly payment, or swipe my card at a gas pump or a restaurant. Is there any type of conversation that needs to take place or does that happen within the card automatically and therefore, Bitcoin Cash is really something with an extra step where I can use it, but I still have to convert it to fiat to use it, does the swipe do that automatically?

Roger Ver: So the Fusex card, they will automatically convert your cryptocurrency into whatever fiat is needed to pay the merchant. So, it’s kind of a custodial wall with Fusex where they hold your crypto for you but allow you to spend it anywhere that accepts credit cards. Although another really fun thing that we have coming, hopefully within this year with the Bitcoin.com Wallet is you will be able to spend it with just about every single major merchant in the U.S. like Walgreens, Walmart, Safeway, Home Depot, just about everywhere. And, will probably be able to give you a 1% discount. It will work right within the existing point of sale terminals that they have in the U.S.. So, that’s the Bitcoin.com Wallet with Bitcoin Cash only. And, it should be ready within this year is the goal.

Chris Neill: So, you have the transactions speed, the readiness, the quick and basically the simplicity of payments on every level, whether its retail, institutional or even a government level. So, to all the XinFin folk listening, those are very strategic questions for some things that we are considering. And I’m not really going to disclose what those things are now, but the potential for XinFin in the future is fantastic and the potential for us, in this specific area brings even more potential for Bitcoin Cash. So I’m going to leave it at that and leave a bit of a Clif hanger for the XinFin community. So, Roger, I told you I promised I would keep it short and sweet. I got the chance to fill you in and got the chance to know you a little bit and I think your passion for Bitcoin Cash is all the more real. Even when we read about it, hearing it here in person, it really reflects the authenticity and genuineness of your passion. So, for the XinFin community listening now, as an advisor to the community, is there anything you’d want to say to the XinFin community? Knock yourself out, this is your moment here.

Roger Ver: I think I’d want to say, to everybody, so if you look around the world, the countries with the most economic freedom have the highest rates of economic growth. And, the countries that have the highest rates of economic growth bring everybody up to a higher standard of living. So get involved with any project that helps bring more economic freedom to the world because that makes the world a better place. So, cryptocurrencies in general and XinFin specifically, get involved because it is all about bringing more economic freedom to the world. So, let’s make it happen.

Chris Neill: Perfect. Alright, so Roger, personally, on behalf of XinFin and the XinFin community I really appreciate you taking the first part of your morning over in Japan to hang out with us. We are going to follow up with you in the future concerning things with Bitcoin Cash. This is a great time because if you look around at the rest of the entire crypto community, it doesn’t matter if they are trying to build a website, online mall, retail payments or institutional level trade and finance or infrastructure, a lot of it is falling away. And one of the things I routinely have conversations within our XinFin community is that the market right now, this isn’t in a dip in the market, I’ve been around long enough and invested enough, this might partially be a dip, but this is also a point that those who don’t have actual value or are gaining traction, because you could have the best technology but if people aren’t going to use it, it’s worthless. So that being said, coming to a point now where only the strong are going to survive, and not getting into evolution, but the same philosophy, we are at the point where the strongest crypto and technology, those who are able to be adopted and those who have value are sticking around and being used across the globe. Not just in America, but Asia Pacific heavily, obviously. So I think this is a great period for XinFin, especially some of the things we have going on. I think this is a great period for Bitcoin Cash, I don’t think there is any argument about its wide adoption. Even some things you hear through the grapevine what’s actually happening, if you can discern through the fake news, so I think this is a transition to where the rest will fall away and you’re going to have some strong players stick around. So, we are happy to have you on board as an advisor and working together in the future. And, like I said buddy, thank you so much for spending part of your morning with us.

Roger Ver: My pleasure, thank you, Chris.

Chris Neill: Yes sir, have a good one.

Roger Ver: You too.