Roger Ver, the ‘Bitcoin Jesus’, backs Dogecoin

Roger Ver, founder of Bitcoin.com, who earned the early nickname ‘Bitcoin Jesus’ for promoting the first cryptocurrency, praised the merits of Dogecoin in an interview with Bloomberg.

On April 26 he broke his year-long silence on Twitter, where he has more than 742,000 followers. This coincided with reports of the purchase of the social network by Elon Musk — an ardent admirer of the meme cryptocurrency.

Ver expressed enthusiasm about the takeover:

“This will undoubtedly make Twitter more attractive. I’m genuinely grateful that Musk is pushing to move away from censorship there.”

In 2017 he advocated a hard fork of Bitcoin, after which Bitcoin Cash emerged. Since then Ver has persistently supported this fork, arguing that it reflects Satoshi Nakamoto’s original vision, from which digital gold, in his view, has diverged.

Now the entrepreneur has weighed in on Musk’s favourite cryptocurrency:

“Dogecoin is significantly better. It is cheaper and more reliable. If I had to pick three contenders [for a dominant role], they would be Dogecoin, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash.”

At the same time Ver said he has never been a Bitcoin or Bitcoin Cash maximalist. He noted that he has a diversified portfolio of currencies, including Ethereum, Monero and Ripple’s XRP.

Since the hard fork, Bitcoin’s market capitalization has roughly tripled to around $760 billion, versus about $5.8 billion for Bitcoin Cash. At the time of writing, the latter trades slightly above $300 — more than 90% below its 2017 peak, according to CoinGecko.

Earlier in 2020, another well-known Bitcoin Cash supporter Craig Wright filed a defamation lawsuit against Ver. He was among a string of lawsuits filed by the self-styled Satoshi Nakamoto against figures in the crypto community.

Among others Wright has filed suits against Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, Blockstream CEO Adam Back, and What Bitcoin Did host Peter McCormack.