Roger Ver was on the Crypto Show, the only terrestrial radio program in the nation covering cryptocurrency. Broadcast from Austin on 90.1 FM Wednesday and Sunday nights and rebroadcast internationally
Roger Ver was on the Crypto Show, the only terrestrial radio program in the nation covering cryptocurrency. Broadcast from Austin on 90.1 FM Wednesday and Sunday nights and rebroadcast internationally as a podcast on the Let's Talk Bitcoin network, the show hosts Danny Somthin and Chris Neandrathal were discussing Bitcoin with Ver, Cody Willson, and others about scaling and the Consensus Conference. Ver runs Memorydealers.com and invests in Bitcoin. He made the case that the network needs to grow faster than its developers currently plan, even if that means accepting risks to decentralization.
He's willing to make a tradeoff most Bitcoin believers reject: embracing some centralization to reach mainstream users. "If scaling bitcoin quickly means there is a risk of [Bitcoin] becoming Paypal 2.0, I think that risk is worth taking because we will always be able to make a Bitcoin 3.0 that [. . .] has the properties that we want," Ver said.
Ver wasn't predicting that Bitcoin would turn into Paypal 2.0 or hoping for that outcome. He was laying out a scenario: if rapid growth forces the network to become more centralized, that's a trade he'd make. Digital currencies can always be rebuilt if they fail. What can't be easily recreated is a moment when the mainstream world adopts one as a standard payment tool.
"We can still make our own version of Bitcoin and all the Crypto-anarchists can still use that, it is just means we lost out for the world as a whole using that platform as its default currency. But I think we have a decent shot of getting the world as a whole using bitcoin and it having the properties we want, if we scale quickly enough [. . .] even if it means taking some risks along the way."
The core issue driving Ver's frustration centers on block size. Bitcoin's blockchain processes transactions in chunks called blocks, each capped at 1 megabyte. The network aims to confirm each block every 10 minutes, though actual confirmation times fluctuate. As adoption has grown, blocks have filled up faster than the network can process them, pushing users to pay higher fees to jump the queue.
Current fees hover around a nickel per transaction. Services that might have run on Bitcoin can't afford those costs. That's not an academic concern for Ver. Bitcoin.com, which he owns, would host services using Ethereum instead of Bitcoin for now, because Bitcoin's scaling limitations make it impractical.
"It is breaking my heart but I might have to start launching some things based on Ethereum for things on Bitcoin.com," Ver said. "Services that I wanted to launch on Bitcoin aren't possible now because of the artificial suppression of the blocksize."
Bitcoin Core, the primary development team overseeing the network, has moved slowly on blocksize increases. Wladimir van der Laan, who leads the Core team, wanted to build consensus before expanding blocks. That cautious approach split him from his predecessor, Gavin Andressen. Core has since published a development roadmap that includes a blocksize increase in coming releases, but Ver views this as too slow.
Ver sees the delay as driven by faith in hypothetical solutions. "They have a bunch of really cool ideas for these layer two technologies, but the problem is that none of them are ready yet and none of them are going to be ready for a while. People want to use bitcoin today, and really cool services are getting priced out of bitcoin today because of the transaction fees that are about a nickle at the moment."
The reason Core moves cautiously is that enlarging blocks has real costs. The blockchain already exceeds 65 gigabytes. Bigger blocks would require more storage and bandwidth from participants running full nodes, potentially shrinking the number of people who do. That could concentrate mining and decision-making power.
That concentration scenario prompted Ver to invoke the Paypal comparison. Centralization could create a cryptocurrency that works as a payment system but lacks the independence Bitcoin proponents value. His point isn't absurd on its surface. Code can fork. If Bitcoin became too centralized, programmers could resurrect an earlier, more decentralized version as "Bitcoin 3.0" for anarchist users.
But that analysis overlooks something fundamental: the network effect. Bitcoin's value doesn't come from the software code alone. It comes from the sum of all miners, users, merchants, and service providers using it. As the network expands, it draws more participants, which attracts more participants in a reinforcing cycle. A newly forked anarchist alternative would have to overcome that momentum to challenge Bitcoin as a global currency, let alone compete with entrenched fiat systems.
Ver appears willing to accept a world where mainstream finance runs on a centralized Bitcoin while Bitcoin purists operate a separate, decentralized currency. He views that split as preferable to the status quo, where most transactions still happen in dollars and euros. But his position rests on a calculation: the gains from Bitcoin reaching billions of users outweigh the risks of losing the decentralization that attracted him to the project initially.
