The curious relation between Bitcoin.com & anti-Segwit propaganda
On the 13th of December Bitcoin.com CEO Roger Ver participated on a discussion panel organized by Whalepool where he was pressed on his opinion of the Segregated Witness soft-fork and whether or not he supported it. His response?
RV: “I am agnostic on the Segwit question. I don’t have enough hashpower to block it. I won’t be the lone hold-out if I have 6% at the end.”
RV: “I’m willing to consider endorsing Segwit. I suppose the reason why I’m not going to endorse Segwit today is mainly because I feel like the current Core team didn’t listen at all to the actual business community using Bitcoin.”
It’s not exactly clear why Roger would be agnostic toward an immediate scaling solution available today, especially when he has been pounding the table for one for more than a year.
However, Roger has been making various public appearances and giving talks that hint quite strongly that Roger may not be quite so agnostic after all and is certainly hostile towards Bitcoin Core developers, regularly casting misleading aspersions. But recently something more sinister has turned up, which is the focus of this article.
Roger Ver, owner and CEO of bitcoin.com, employs several people to work on the bitcoin.com website as programmers, content authors, and to work on services like his bitcoin mining pool, as well as moderate his subreddit r/btc (list of moderators).
One of these full time employees is self-confessed /u/magmahindenburg. He is the CTO for Roger’s projects including bitcoin.com, Roger’s mining pool, Roger’s website forums and is a moderator with full permissions for Roger’s r/btc subreddit.
A little more research shows that /u/magmahindenberg is also hosting Roger’s website on “Serious Tubes” IP space which he is apparently in control of.
Up to now, there’s nothing too controversial, except for the fact that the CTO of bitcoin.com is running a vicious campaign against Bitcoin Core, Core contributors, Segwit and Blockstream.
A few weeks ago a troll twitter account appeared called @segwit along with a reddit account /u/segwitty and a website http://segwit.club
Screenshot of the domain:
However, in a little slip of OPSEC, /u/magmahindenberg didn’t hide the domain registration segwit.club which shows him as the registered owner. Whoops.
Let’s not forget that Roger Ver has claimed to be “agnostic towards Segwit" (audio) — yet here we find one of Roger’s most important full time employees, the heart of his technical operations, is investing considerable time and energy in attacking Bitcoin Core, Segwit, and Blockstream.
Examples follow:
Attacking Bitcoin Core developers:
Attacking Blockstream:
You can see more “gems” here.
There’s sadly a lot more evidence of maleficence, this is just the tip of the iceberg…
*Edit: This article was submitted to both /r/bitcoin and /r/btc. It was removed almost immediately on /r/btc by one of Roger Ver’s paid employees, BitcoinXio. Claiming it was a dox, even though there was no dox on Reddit or in this article. There are only links to archived websites, one which happens to be a whois. The segwit.club website has already been edited too.*
