Roger Keith Ver, born in 1979 in San Jose, California, is an early Bitcoin advocate and investor known as 'Bitcoin Jesus' for his evangelism, including funding ads, billboards, and radio promotions, as well as the 2011 'Bitcoin Bet' predicting BTC would outperform gold by 100x in two years. He attended Valley Christian High School, De Anza College for one year, and one semester at Stanford University before dropping out to pursue entrepreneurship. Ver founded MemoryDealers.com in 1999 at age 19, becoming its CEO until 2012; the company led the market in networking equipment, employed dozens worldwide, generated millions in revenue, and was the first business to accept Bitcoin payments in 2011. In 2005, he founded Agilestar.com, a leader in optical transceivers for Fortune 100 companies. Starting in 2011 when BTC was ~$1, he invested over $1M in startups such as BitInstant (first investment), BitPay (seed), Kraken (seed), Blockchain.com (co-founder and first investor), and Ripple (co-founder, second investor after Jed McCaleb). He co-founded the Silicon Valley Bitcoin Meetup, was a founding member of the Bitcoin Foundation, served as former CEO and then Executive Chairman of Bitcoin.com, assisted in the 2011 Mt. Gox crisis, and authored 'Hijacking Bitcoin' critiquing Bitcoin's evolution. A proponent of larger blocks via Bitcoin XT, he advocates for 'peer-to-peer cash' cryptocurrencies per Satoshi's whitepaper and was an early supporter of Bitcoin Cash, drawing criticism in the Bitcoin community where some called him the 'Antichrist.' Politically, Ver is a libertarian, anarcho-capitalist, and voluntaryist; he ran for California State Assembly (District 22) in 2000 as a Libertarian Party candidate, criticizing the ATF and FBI as 'jack-booted thugs and murderers' over Waco. His legal history includes a 2002 guilty plea to unlicensed sale of explosives (firecrackers) from home, resulting in 10 months in federal prison. In 2024, he was arrested in Spain on a U.S. indictment for mail fraud, tax evasion, and false tax returns, accused of evading ~$50M in taxes on BTC sales around his 2014 renunciation of U.S. citizenship; on October 14, 2025, he entered a deferred prosecution agreement with the DOJ, paid ~$49.9M in back taxes, penalties, and interest, and had the indictment dismissed. Controversies include a 2022 dispute with CoinFLEX alleging a $47M debt (which he denied; the matter was sued and settled, confirming over $100M owed to Ver). Personally, Ver renounced U.S. citizenship on April 4, 2014, after acquiring St. Kitts and Nevis citizenship, and obtained Antigua and Barbuda citizenship in 2020. He has lived in Japan since ~2006, resided in Spain at the time of his 2024 arrest, and leads a nomadic lifestyle with interests in biotech and fintech.