Roger Ver Lies

I am one of the calmer Bitcoiners, who does not weigh in too much into Bitcoin’s social issues, rather silently writes code. But not today.

I previously analyzed a debate between Roger Ver and Tone Vays. I objectively examined their arguments and talking points. I overcame my temptations to use the words: liar, dishonest and hypocrite. In other words I avoided using the proper terminology in order to be politically correct.

I don’t know why today, his recent tweet was just one of the many examples of his manipulative personality, but I decided to elaborate on this one:

There are so much to say about this tweet, but let us not dismiss the big picture: his message is that Bitcoin fees are high and he has the solution, Bitcoin Cash. I will not judge if that is a message worth spreading or not, instead I concentrate on the methods he has chosen to spread this message.

Now that we got this out of the way, let’s take a look at how many lies can be crammed into 140 characters.

Bitcoin.com Mining Pool

Roger Ver has his own Bitcoin mining pool. One of the very few power mining pools have is selecting transactions. He could create transactions and build them into a block he mines. The only reason not to do this would be if he wants to bitch about fees on twitter.

Or is it unethical? If you consider it yes, then you must consider many mining pool services are unethical, like ViaBTC’s transaction accelerator. And anyway, this would not be the first time Roger Ver abuses his administrator access. In 2012 he got scammed by a customer of his, as a response he posted his personal information on Bitcointalk, including his phone number, IP address, Blockchain.info’s confidential information, including his guid, shared_key, secret_key and secret_phase. After that info was public, anyone could delete his wallet from blockchain.info’s server. Let’s just say some moral hazard is a non-issue for him.

Furthermore his pool mined three blocks today and two of them were not even half full. How much of a hypocrite must you be to do that?

How Bitcoin Payroll Works

Is the “first Bitcoin investor” so incompetent he does not even have in place a proper Bitcoin payroll? Pay to many is one of the simplest Bitcoin transaction type. If you make the payment as a pay to many payment, the cost would’ve been 8 times smaller.

If you have 50 employees you pay every month in the same time don’t make 50 transactions, but only one big with many outputs.

So it’s $1.3 per employee. But wait Nicolas was assuming Roger Ver was not lying and the average Bitcoin transaction fee today is indeed $8.9.

Even His Numbers Are Lies

Today is 2017-09-02. Average bitcoin transaction fees were exactly $8.9 on 2017-08-25, 8 days ago. Coincidentally it was an all time high. Mystery solved: he cherry picked that number, because he forgot to bitch about it back then.

I am not even going to search figure out if he lies about the Bitcoin Cash transaction fees. I leave this exercise for my readers.

Update: Opportunity Cost

A counter argument against pay to many is the opportunity cost. Apparently it is too much hassle for a Bitcoin CEO to do a pay-to-many transaction. His time is more valuable. Fair enough argument. It’s simpler to not bother with implementing an efficient payroll. But you are using Bitcoin in an unusual way and most people, who are using Bitcoin don’t have to pay out 50 employees monthly, so making it seem like this is a common problem is unfair. At this point this tweet is all about to start a public outcry on how terribly bad Bitcoin user experience the Bitcoin CEOs, who are too lazy to use Bitcoin in the proper way have.

Average Transaction Fees vs P2[W]PKH Transaction Fees

There is another catch. The average Bitcoin fees are terrible metric. If I we make 10 200 bytes transactions and there is one transaction that’s 100KB, the average transaction size won’t be anywhere near 200 bytes, where the transaction fee what matters for normal users is the 200 bytes transaction. You, me and other individual Bitcoin users are not paying average transaction fees. We are sending P2PKH or P2WPKH transactions, usually with one input and two outputs. These are the smallest frequent transactions on the Blockchain. Guess what would be the highest fee you would pay at the time of writing to confirm as soon as possible for such transaction? 350sat/byte*200byte = 70000 satoshi -> $3.2. This is the absolute highest you would pay, not the average, nor the lowest. Here I used P2PKH transaction sizes, with segwit, this absolute highest number would be 40% less. In fact, if everyone would use segwit, this number would be 4 times less.

Notice how we got from 8.9$ average fees to $1.92 absolute highest fees? Consider full segwit adoption and we have 80 cents absolute highest fees. What would be the average? I don’t know, maybe 40 cents? Who cares, the point is: nowhere near $9.

You know what, I’m going to crash you in your own game. Take a look at this Bitcoin Cash block. Average BCH Fee: $44.30!

The Icing On The Cake

Notice, how he accidentally admits he was only able to brainwash half of his team:

Conclusion

There was a time when Roger Ver was one of my hero and he made me very excited about Bitcoin and its potential. I even kept telling others excuses when he blatantly lied that “everything is fine with MtGox, the current banking system is the issue with the withdrawals.” Which of course resulted many losing money.

However his toxic behavior during the last couple of years made me be ashamed of myself for ever advocating him.