Roger Ver: The Best Islands for Crypto Investors

i'm andrew henderson this is another nomad capitalist interview this is the channel for seven and eight figure entrepreneurs who want to legally go where they're treated best reducing their taxes overseas having second passports looking for new opportunities and uh it's all here in the best-selling amazon book nomad capitalist uh really excited today to be joined by roger ver who is one of the most prominent people in the crypto currency industry founder of bitcoin.com the proclaimed bit cam bitcoin jesus where did they come up with that uh who who first came up with that roger bitcoin jesus some somebody else came up with that name i i definitely did not choose that name myself but uh i think bitcoin johnny appleseed probably would have been a bit more appropriate because i was busy spreading bitcoin adoption all over the world for uh over a decade now actually so in the very beginning of 2011 i got started and basically funded all the original bitcoin startup businesses and uh was telling anybody i could get to listen uh to me about bitcoin and how this was going to change everything in the world and somewhere along the line people started calling me bitcoin jesus but things didn't turn out too well for the original jesus so i i hope to meet a better fate you did not invent bitcoin jesus that was somebody else yeah i absolutely did not choose that name for myself i think it actually started there was a barbecue uh and i was telling a bunch of high school kids about bitcoin and setting them up with wallets and sending them some and you know young people you know digital currencies don't seem so wild or crazy for them and so they were all just enthralled and said yeah this is great i can't wait to use this and uh one of the other adults who was probably in their 40s or 50s looked at me surrounded by two dozen high school kids and he said roger it's like you're you're a bitcoin jesus and you have all your disciples around you and so i think that was the original origin there but uh i definitely did not choose that nickname for myself helping people to multiply the loaves and the fishes as it were i suppose hopefully some of those people went on to take your advice i hope yeah quite quite in fact i just had somebody texting me the other day and said thank you i gave them a whole bitcoin back in 2011 uh when it was just worth you know a couple bucks each and they said they still held on to it and they have it all and uh they were very uh appreciative of that so that that's done very well for them over the last few years ten years ago what motivated you to get into bitcoin what did you see back when almost no one was talking about this well i've studied a whole bunch of economics as a young man and the more economics you study the more you realize that any time government interferes in people trying to trade with each other they're preventing both people from being better off and so the more barriers to trade we can tear down in the world the better off the entire world is going to be and i'm living in this world with everybody else and so then when i heard about bitcoin i realized i heard about it in reference to the silk road i i've only been a spectator on darknet markets i've never been a participant but i found it incredibly interesting that they were able to use this to buy and sell things without permission and anytime anybody can buy and sell things without permission uh so long as it's you know a peaceful thing where things aren't counterfeit or stolen or something like that it's a good thing for everybody involved and so i became very very interested in the type of money that they were using for that sort of thing and because i had a background in economics and a background in computer science i could understand technically how bitcoin work and i could understand you know economically how this is literally going to change the way the entire world works because now any human being anywhere on the planet can send or receive any amount of money with any other human being anywhere on the planet and there's nothing that anybody can do to stop them and that was an incredibly powerful exciting thing uh for me and i knew i had to get involved full time in that because uh it was literally one of the most important inventions in all of human uh history you have the wheel electricity the internet and then probably the invention of the bitcoin is right up there uh in terms of importance for all of human history it's it's truly one of the most important inventions ever by the way roger is going to be at nomad capitalist live in mexico so we'll obviously be talking about this a lot more there and a lot of his experiences and you can meet him but i know you wanted to talk about where you think some of the more mainstream adopters of cryptocurrency are perhaps mistaken we'll get to that in a moment you mentioned silk road uh one of the things people talk about is growing adoption of cryptocurrency you know how do you square that with uh this idea that certainly the government pushes and i you hear people a lot of them listen to the government that this is something that is silk road it is nefarious how do you square that when people are still saying it's good for this you know voluntary interaction most people don't want that uh if you look at it there's more than a hundred thousand websites that now accept cryptocurrencies for payments there's people all over the world using it to buy and sell non non-illegal things just normal things in fact uh i'm going to be going to a another caribbean island here shortly i just booked my uh my villa that i rented there in bitcoin cash i booked the rental car in bitcoin cash i paid for everything in bitcoin cash none of that's illegal none of that was tax aversion of asian stuff it was all just normal old regular old commerce uh and in fact here in antigua where i'm recording this you can spend bitcoin cash at just about every single restaurant here none of that's illegal none of that's you know crazy stuff it's just normal people going about their normal lives and any tool that can make it easier for normal people to go about their normal lives uh that's a good thing and if you look at it around the world the currency that's used for the most illegal things and the most horrible things around the world it's the us dollar by far it's not second place isn't even close if you really want to complain about people using currencies for illegal things that you should be concerned about the us dollar is is antigua you say you're in the the caribbean island of of antigua uh you've been there for a while as i understand is this greater crypto adoption because you're there in convincing people to get on board what why is it uh catching on i i absolutely played a role in it but there's a lot of other people helping me we have super active bitcoin cash meetups here just about every restaurant's accepting it you have a bunch of other businesses accepting it you can even pay for your citizenship here uh in bitcoin cash i'm sure nomad capitalist can help you with that as well i know andrew accepts cryptocurrencies for all of his services as well but it's really starting to catch on here in a big way and it's fun to see it because we were starting with such an easy starting point it's only a country of a little under 100 000 people and when you have a country that small you can really uh change things quickly and and do big things and literally more restaurants than not accepted this point you can literally buy i've been buying the gas at the normal old gas station in bitcoin cash when i felt the you know the gas tank of my car here it's really really amazing how quickly it's catching on and just how much awareness there is across it uh for the entire country in fact out of the blue as i was driving around in my own car yesterday i saw a taxi here who had a bitcoin cash sticker it's a bitcoin cash accepted here on the back of his taxi uh it was amazing i wasn't expecting to see that i was just driving around and there it was so it's really amazing when but if you've dealt with the banks here you can understand why people are so eager to have an alternative uh dealing with the banks here is definitely a challenge and in most places in the world the banks only seem to be getting more and more difficult to deal with whereas cryptocurrencies are every year easier and easier to deal with a lot of the banks in antigua though a lot of these offshore banks have been pushed by the same jurisdictions now that are pushing back on crypto that's part of why they've become so difficult they've always been an island time but i think more difficult because the u.s the eu have said even you know though when they were sovereign countries back in the late 70s early 80s hey offshore banking that's how you should make your money and support yourself now they're against it now they're basically trying to shut it down uh so what's interesting to me is i've always thought these smaller countries can turn on a dime you're from the united states what do you see in terms of crypto in the united states in the mainstream is it easier to convince people in antigua it's definitely easier to convince people in antigua just because they're their own nation here and one of the biggest industries in antigua previously was online gaming all these online poker websites and different gaming websites a huge amount of them were based here in antigua and everything was going great and there was lots of jobs in the country and people were making money and then the us government had their big giant clamp down on online gaming and that really disrupted the entire country of antigua and disrupted the economy here and the country of antigua literally sued the united states in the world court that the u.s government set up the u.s government lost and the us government still refused to pay i think it's in the tens of millions or maybe hundreds of millions of us dollars worth now that's owed to antigua and they still haven't paid them for that so but they understand the way the us government cut off all the online gaming was by blocking the payments but now that we have an uncensorable payment network in the form of cryptocurrency all these local people here are potentially uh looking at that oh maybe there's going to be a revival of the online gaming industry and it can be based here in nt again thanks to cryptocurrencies like bitcoin cash not thanks to the banks because they're all under the thumb of uh you know the us and the europeans basically control and dictate to them what they can and can't do and to a certain extent the citizenship as well fortunately uh in a sense antique was the last country to lose access to canada perhaps a blessing in disguise that now they don't have to kowtow to the u.s or to canada they do have to perhaps somewhat to europe or to the uk uh do you think you know as you travel around the caribbean i know you're a citizen of saint kitts and nevis uh we'll talk about that a little bit later as well do you think people there feel uh oppressed perhaps is too strong of a word by all these external forces and that's why they're looking at crypto as an opportunity to make a living basically oppressed is a bit of a strong word i don't know how much you can say like that you're oppressed by the state of nature but uh for anybody that's read ludwig von mises you'll remember him talking about in human action that man is in a constant state of uneasiness and you're always looking for you know how you can improve your position and your circumstance in the world that's any time you see something whether you know it's a piece of food or a chair to sit in or money that you can zip around the world without needing permission from anybody to send or receive it that's improving your position in the world and your ability to to navigate through life and and and you know feel happier as you go through it so anytime people come across anything like that it's going to be attractive to them and anybody you know who's waited in line at a bank or pulled their hair out from trying to deal with a bank when they see how easy it is to permissionlessly set up a cryptocurrency wallet and then send and receive payments with somebody all over the world where you literally don't even have to give your name to do it that's a really really big improvement in somebody's life and so people are going to be attracted to that but one thing i can say is that the people here in antigua are a bit more open-minded to some of their neighboring islands here in the caribbean uh they're much more willing to talk to strangers and and and try new things and it's been really really fantastic to see the the bitcoin cash meetups we've had here uh some of them i think close to 100 people have shown up to and that's a lot for a country that's this small um there it would be a huge meet up if we got 100 people to show up at the meetup in tokyo where we have a metropolitan area of 35 million people yeah right here in little old antigua with a hundred thousand people we're having similar size meetups than we have uh in tokyo so it's really really uh impressive to see just how much open-mindedness there are from the antigens here and what do you think that is versus the other islands or versus other countries well i think part of it also is is maybe the coronavirus lockdowns around the world have really decimated the economies uh here and and around the world and so when you're having a really hard time with your traditional business and the government's locking everything down or telling you you're not allowed to open or whatever you're going to be a lot more receptive to new new ways to do things as people become more receptive you see more institutional money getting in you see big people getting into this i know you've had some differing thoughts from some of the big players that are getting into the bitcoin space around the utility of this what are some of the the areas where you push back on some of the the newer money into crypto yeah i think a lot of the newer money in into crypto they're more interested in it being a non-correlated asset which is fine but the reason it became a non-correlated asset to begin with at all is that it was permissionless peer-to-peer cash so some of the newer money uh into crypto they only seem interested in it as a non-correlated asset but i think they're misunderstanding the reason it became a non-correlated asset at all is because it worked as peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world where you could send or receive any amount of money with anyone anywhere instantly basically for free and the frustrating part for me is that bitcoin no longer behaves that way the average fees as we're recording this to make a bitcoin transaction or somewhere in the ballpark of twelve dollars per transaction uh that's too much right and so we heard uh the the person that inspired me to reach out to you and asked to do this was a michael sayler recently was talking about how all these different businesses are going to build beautiful user interfaces for people to use cryptocurrency and it's going to be much faster and easier than a blockchain but the point i think he missed there is that if you don't have the ability to have self-custody of your cryptocurrency you're right back where we were with uh you know watching every platform from paypal to gofundme to you know even youtube now shutting down people's platforms or shutting down people's ability to use the platform whereas if you have a cryptocurrency like a bitcoin cash or like any currency that has low enough fees for people to be able to transact in directly without needing a paypal without needing a square without needing a cash app to hold the custody of the funds for them you're in a whole new world there you're in a whole new league where you truly have peer-to-peer electronic cash and if you study economics you'll see the reason gold became a store of value is because it had other use cases right it's been used in dentistry for thousands of years it's been used in electronics it's been used in all sorts of things in america everybody uses the dollar as their store value but the reason they use the dollar is because they can spend it anywhere in europe everyone uses the euro as a store value because you can spend the euro anywhere if you weren't able to spend the dollar anywhere or everywhere and if you weren't able to spend the euro everywhere people wouldn't use them as stores of value and so i see it the same way with cryptocurrencies they need to be spindle everywhere in order for them to be usable as a store value if you destroy its usefulness in actual commerce what do you have left you just have a speculative asset where you're gonna have speculators speculating on the future speculation of other speculators that's not a long-term sustainable game that i would want to be involved in there whereas if you can have it where people can have complete control over their money and even literally send bitcoin cash over a youtube video the first person to scan each one of these uh qr codes gets five dollars in bitcoin cash it literally goes from this piece of paper through the camera to your phone if you scan this with the bitcoin.com wallet app or any other app that can scan a private key you'll literally get the free money from this each one has five dollars on it you can't do that with bitcoin any longer because of the intentional high fees it would have cost ten dollars to load each one of these squares and then to claim each five dollar square you'd have to pay ten dollars in fees it's not doable at all so it's basically become a network where you have to trust custodians to handle it for you but as we're seeing all over the world now on every major social media platform everything else people are being de-platformed and if you're being de-platformed it's not censorship-resistant peer-to-peer cash for the world which is what made cryptocurrencies popular to begin with and so i think it's really really important to understand that that's the characteristic that made bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general attractive to people all over the world that gave it a price and then had it shoot up to this wild price and so today everybody's buying the brand they know and the brand they know is bitcoin but the user experience that made bitcoin popular no longer exists on bitcoin the user experience that made bitcoin popular begin with is on things like bitcoin cash and monero and zcash and a bunch of other ones out there bitcoins just this brand but it doesn't have the actual characteristics that made bitcoin popular to begin with and that's i guess where i take uh issue with some of these other newer entrants to the cryptocurrency space is that if it's not usable as cash it's not going to be usable as a store value long term so let me play the devil's advocate i talk about the united states where you and i are from as a legacy brand other countries well-known countries are legacy brands you could argue i think you and i would america no longer lives in the united states it's a concept that is now other places takes a long people long time for people to adapt to the idea that the brand they thought was what it was isn't the brand and so how do you communicate that and how do you think that plays out in terms of bitcoin cash which you promote for example versus the name brand yeah i i think we're already seeing it with america so many of the best and the brightest entrepreneurs either already have left are actively leaving or are actively considering leaving and i think at some point you're right maybe people will figure out that america the brand isn't the same america that that made america great to begin with and america literally overthrew the existing government over a quarter percent tax on tea and now you know individual states california has more than 10 percent income tax on top of the the federal income tax there too so america isn't the america that that was born and became you know this this bastion of economic freedom around the world any longer and bitcoin isn't the peer-to-peer electronic cash that made it popular to begin with either but how long will it take for people to figure that out i don't know but uh i'm doing my best to help get the word out and i i think once people figure it out all you have to do to figure it out try making a bitcoin transaction try sitting and receiving some with somebody and you realize wait a minute this this doesn't work uh and in fact so i set up one of the i set up the first major e-commerce website to accept bitcoin in the entire world it was called bitcoinstar.com back in 2012 and we were accepting bitcoin for payments for more than a half a million consumer electronics products and uh the thing that really made me jump ship from bitcoin is in around i think 2017 it became absolutely unusable for payments you were paying thousands of dollars in fees for a single bitcoin transaction granted i was moving around tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars worth at a time but nobody wants to pay thousands of dollars in fees for a single transaction and not only that but the transaction would take hours or days or sometimes would get stuck and not go through it all bitcoin became absolutely unusable for commerce and if it's unusable for you know commercial payments well why would i store my value in that so i switched eventually to promoting bitcoin cash because i think it's the best tool to bring the most economic freedom to the most number of people around the world and if you can bring more economic freedom to the world the rate of economic growth increases everybody's standard of living increases and as a side effect everybody that's early to it uh will make a bunch of money just like everybody that was early to bitcoin does too so it's a win-win situation you get to bring more economic freedom to the world and you get to benefit personally as well it's a fantastic tool to to bring more economic freedom to the world and this is the world that i'm living in and so i want to make it the best world i possibly can because i plan to be in it for a while longer what do you say then to the michael sailors or to so many other people who say this is an asset that like uber wealthy families people are going to hold on to for generations for centuries i don't want to spend it and people would say if you're going out and buying a a dvd player back in 2012 or whatever people were buying back in 2012 with bitcoin that was stupid what do you say to those folks are are they elitists because you know they're not focusing on people in antigua for example who just want to sell stuff at their restaurant well i think they're also missing the point that there's a time preference there too like i i just bought the newest iphone a month back or so um i'm sure for that exact same amount of money in a year from now i'll be able to buy a much much much better iphone but people want it right right now and so i think the same is true with the cryptocurrencies right if you just hold it and you never ever ever do anything with it whether there's no actual use case right like this iphone is a lot more useful to me than a rock because i can do all sorts of things with the iphone that i can't do with a rock the same is true with cryptocurrencies that actually work for payments they're a lot more useful than cryptocurrencies that don't work for payments and so with bitcoin and bitcoin cash for example they're both equally scarce they both have 21 million coins there's never going to be more than that but one of them actually works for payments around the world you can buy your gasoline you can buy your food you can go shopping you can you know spend it at more than a hundred thousand websites and the fee per transaction is a fraction of a penny uh with bitcoin the transaction fee is going to be you know 10 20 sometimes 50 or even a thousand dollars and you have no idea of how long it's going to take your transaction to go through it's very very clear that one of those is more useful in commerce and therefore more useful to more people around the world uh i invite michael saylor hey mike go and make a bitcoin transaction and then make a bitcoin cash transaction and it will be clear to you but i think most of these people probably including michael seller i think he's no in fact i sent him i sent him a dollar a bitcoin cash and i sent him 99 dollars a bitcoin cash via twitter direct message i don't think he ever saw my message um but it was sitting there in his twitter inbox uh you can't do that with bitcoin i sent those to him on chain the one dollar is completely impossible to send anybody worth of bitcoin the 99 is impractical to send via bitcoin because it would cost you ten dollars to send it and the person who got it would then cost ten dollars the next time they want to send it it's just like an ice cube that melts in in your in your hand so you can't use ice cubes as money because it'll melt well bitcoin bitcoin is like ice cubes melting every time you try and send it and uh i think he's never used it it would be my guess and there was another guy i was talking to recently he bought more than 100 million dollars of bitcoin with his own money and i asked him i said have you ever made a bitcoin transaction on chain and he had to think about anything he wasn't sure if he had he thinks he might have maybe one time and so i sent him some bitcoin i i sent him you know five bucks worth of bitcoin cash not because it's any amount of money that matters to him you know guy has at least 100 million dollars but i sent him five bucks in bitcoin cash to point out to him that you can't send somebody five dollars in bitcoin and so for the vast majority of the world five dollars is enough money that it's an average sized purchase of something if you can't do it with bitcoin but you can do it with bitcoin cash that makes bitcoin cash a lot more attractive so if you have two cryptocurrencies both equally scarce but one actually works for payments it seems very clear to me which one's going to be more popular in the long run and i invite everybody to go and you know give these a try for yourself and then use use whichever one seems more useful to you in your own your own life did you make the switch uh when the when i saw the fees hitting a thousand dollars on bitcoin uh and then i saw the final chance at bitcoin being able to scale to be money for the world which was this thing called the segwit2x agreement and the idea was to do this one thing called segwit and then to also increase the block size on bitcoin from one megabyte to two megabytes and i think this was i don't know back in 2017 or 18 now it's been a while and when the two the two megabyte part of that basically was abandoned which would have doubled bitcoin's throughput capacity right now it can do three and a half transactions per second so would have been able to do six or seven transactions per second after that and a bunch of people that i think have no business sense and weren't successful entrepreneurs before um argued against that when they successfully scuttled that upgrade to bitcoin it was clear that bitcoin could never scale to become permissionless peer-to-peer cash for the world it would never become this giant tool to bring more economic freedom to the world so i looked at all the other cryptocurrencies out there i looked at the ethereums and the ripples and this and that and there's thousands of them now and i looked at all of them and i thought okay every single person in the world that held bitcoin on august uh first i think it was of 2017 now has bitcoin and bitcoin cash it's accepted widely around the world and basically i looked at all the characteristics there and it looked to me uh back then and it still does bitcoin cash is the cryptocurrency that has the best chance of bringing the most economic freedom to the most number of people around the world and when i say economic freedom i mean the ability to transact economically with other people around the world without needing permission from politicians or bureaucrats or regulators and not even permission from some custodian to send your money not having to give your name or your email address or or your tax id number to anybody it just works and works for any person anywhere on the planet and to me that's so exciting and when the 2x part of the the upgrade plan for bitcoin died to me that was the day bitcoin died as money for the world and so i wanted to promote something that i thought had a chance to bring more economic freedom to the world and today that's bitcoin cash but if next week i thought it was some other cryptocurrency i'd be out there you know ringing the bell for that other cryptocurrency as well because the the goal isn't the goal isn't for bitcoin cash to become money for the world the the goal is to build the tools that enable every single human being on the planet to be able to transact with every other human being on the planet and not need permission from some other human being that has nothing to do with their transaction and that's what i'm trying to build with bitcoin.com and that's what i'm trying to build with bitcoin cash and i think every you know nomad capitalist uh can appreciate the the ability to being able to transact with other people and not need permission from some other person and to be able to do it privately as well and we're busy building that right into the bitcoin.com wallet too is this the difference between your background you've been an entrepreneur pretty much for your entire life as i have right 19 20 years old i think you had a lot of different things you had memory dealers you were selling stuff on ebay is this the difference perhaps between an entrepreneur who's looking at transactions i just did a bitcoin transaction recently and yeah it cost about 7 800 bucks uh is this the difference between that person and the investor i think that they are different personality types is is bitcoin cash in your opinion more of the entrepreneurial mindset bitcoin cash definitely is the libertarian entrepreneurial mindset i think bitcoin is more the software engineer developer mindset and they let the the good enough problem be the enemy of the of the perfect solution or they think if the solution isn't perfect well we're not going to go with this good enough solution anyhow and so they'd rather do nothing at all which then caused a disaster and i i remember seeing that happen with a number of these software developer types they just didn't care that there was going to be an absolute disaster and and the entrepreneurial mindset it really drove me nuts i heard one of them saying well if we just increase the block size it'll let all the businesses using bitcoin just relax and i was like of course that's what we want we want every single user of bitcoin around the world to be able to just relax and have it just work and not have to worry about anything so that we can be busy attracting new users to bitcoin and instead he wanted all the existing users to have to go and jump through a bunch of hoops and do all sorts of stuff and upgrade this and change that just to be able to continue using bitcoin and for me you know as a business owner for a long long time you want to make everything as easy as you possibly can for your customers so that it goes as smooth as it possibly can you want to make it it's easy for them to pay you and it's easy for everything to go and you make sure you gently remind them here's your invoice here's my bank details here's how you can pay if you want to pay me this way that's fine you want to make everything as easy as you possibly can you don't just email them the tracking number you email them the track number and right below and saying here's the link you can click on to see the fedex page with your tracking number so you know when your product's going to get there you do absolutely anything and everything you can to make the user experience for your customers easy as you possibly can and i'm sad to say that with the bitcoin software engineers and the bitcoin core developers did the exact opposite they did everything they could to make it as difficult for businesses to start using bitcoin and lo and behold the person that got designated with the name bitcoin jesus moved on to something else that provided a better user experience for more people around the world and that's what you'll get with any business if you make it difficult for your customers to use your product they're going to find a different product and they're going to start using that as well so in economics theory it's called substitute goods theory if coca-cola becomes really expensive or hard to get people more people are going to start drinking pepsi and if coca-cola and pepsi both become difficult more people are going to start drinking you know seven up or root beer or or iced tea or whatever else out there and the same is true with cryptocurrencies they'll still never drink rc cola though that'll be the one they'll never no matter what you do you can force them to sell that stuff uh you're saying frictionless like amazon one click it comes yeah and that's how bitcoin used to work it used to be an amazing magical experience where the transactions most of the time were completely fee free if there was any fee it was so small you didn't really have to pay attention and the transactions were instant and basically irreversible and instead of that they've now changed it to slow expensive reversible transactions that are a big pain in the butt to use uh well surprise surprise bitcoin's market share of cryptocurrencies went from basically 100 down to 50 something percent and so for the people who are still in bitcoin uh obviously they've done very well recently most cryptos have done very well recently what do you say to the folks who are getting into bitcoin uh who have done well and say you know why don't i stick with this it is the brand i would invest in real estate in the united states and not in you know not in antigua not in georgia it's fine they have done very fine investing and uh that's a good thing the more people that make more money in bitcoin that's great thing i want to see people successful all over the world but at this point i feel like bitcoin is more a game of musical chairs with people getting in and buying in and their hope if you listen to them they buy it with dollars now their hope is that they'll be able to sell it for more dollars later on that's not a long-term sustainable strategy and then their other hope is that maybe they'll be able to figure out the technological platform to make bitcoin usable for payments and as you know michael sayler and others have been talking about oh you'll have all these custodial platforms where people are able to use them custodially well i think you've lost the vast vast majority of the attractive part about them if you're having to use a custodian yeah it's a bit better than the dollar because they can't print as many as they want at any time but we've already seen it happen with bitcoin we've had uh fractional reserve platforms where everybody thinks they have one number of bitcoin in the platform but it turned out the platform had been hacked people had lost bitcoins uh and it turns out you don't get them all back so anytime you have to use a custodian to hold your bitcoin you're at their mercy and there will be lots and lots of custodians but we want people to have the option to be able to hold the cryptocurrency themselves if you take away the option of people being able to hold the cryptocurrency themselves you open up the door for all sorts of shenanigans where you can have fractional reserve stuff and and and hackings and for custodians as well the more cryptocurrency that's being held by a custodian the bigger a target it becomes for hackers whereas if you have a billion people around the world all holding you know a thousand bucks a crypto you have a billion different potential targets for hackers if you have paypal or you know cash app or whoever holding billion dollars worth of crypto you have one single giant target that they're going to be after and that's much much more dangerous to cryptocurrency uh in general when you have these giant centralized institutions they're acting as custodians for everybody and i'm not opposed to custodians in general you just have to have the ability to be able to do self-custodianship where you where you hold the funds yourselves what are the countries that you think are most crypto friendly right now which countries are being versatile and saying let's bring these new opportunities in antigua without a doubt is one of the ones towards the top of the list there's really a huge amount of adoption and welcomeness from the government to uh cryptocurrencies in general and bitcoin cash specifically if the world wasn't locked down with corona travel restrictions here antigua would be one of the it would probably be the top uh cryptocurrency vacation destination you can literally pay for just about everything here uh so when vacations are allowed again i invite everybody to come here and give things a try but singapore has also been doing a fantastic job uh of welcoming this sort of uh entrepreneurial ship and cryptocurrency adoption uh japan has been surprisingly uh uh welcoming as well although as someone who's lived in japan for a long time and speaks fluent japanese i can tell you a big part of the reason why this adoption's been happening in japan is that all the japanese bureaucrats they know that bitcoin was created by satoshi nakamoto obviously a japanese person and they have a lot of nationalistic pride where they want the entire world to know what a wonderful thing was created by this satoshi nakamoto person and uh even in like 2012 the i think it was the japanese central banker i'd have to check mama exchange but they reached out to me wanting to meet with satoshi directly because they wanted to talk to him in japanese about bitcoin and they didn't understand that satoshi was just some anonymous name that somebody was using but uh around the world we're seeing a lot but uh a big change that we've seen uh in in the us that i think is a problem in the early days everybody knew bitcoin was money and then the irs came out with a ruling that no bitcoin is property and we're going to treat it like property and it's going to be subject to capital gains tax and this and that i think that was a disaster for bitcoin adoption uh bitcoin was supposed to be money from from day one and uh i'm i'm working on uh getting it ruled to be official money of a particular country and if that's the case it'll really open the door for investors in uh in the u.s and europe and all over the place to be able to invest in it just like doing the other forex trade and it'll it'll help get rid of a lot of the capital gains tax requirements for bitcoin cash specifically what country do you think might do that no comment i'm working on it so you'll you'll stay in suspense you you left the u.s when when did you physically leave so i physically left the us in in 2006 and then uh i started the renunciation process well the first step to renounce is you have to get citizenship somewhere else and so i looked into that in 2006 but it was expensive and it would have been a big chunk of my net worth at that point and then uh it wasn't until bitcoin came along and i said okay that's enough for me i haven't lived in the us for at that point it had been you know six or seven years uh and so i started on getting a second citizenship and then the actual renunciation happened and uh february 4th of uh 2014 one of the happiest days of my life do you celebrate february 4th it's uh coming up here do you celebrate february 4th every year i i i definitely will this year i think actually i i kid you not it was actually one of the happiest days my entire life i i just felt so liberated and free and uh you know finally finally uh i'm saying both you know and special special thanks to saint kitts for uh giving me the citizenship there uh what a wonderful wonderful opportunity it was for me and i hope i i'm sure i've been good for them as well but uh the idea of saying kids said literally they have no personal income tax they have no personal capital gains tax i don't even have to file a form at the end of the year and even though i've been gone from the u.s for well over a decade i'm still having to file forms in the u.s but it's just such a wonderful feeling knowing that i don't even have to file a form in saint kitts or antigua for that matter uh really really wonderful and so america claims to be the land of the free uh well you better look to antigua or saint kitts for that you literally don't even have to file a form at the end of the year they have no idea how much money you made or what what you did that's the real land of the free america is just the brand that people know but there's plenty of freer countries in the world at this point at least estonia it's on a postcard basically everyone talks about copying estonia but they can't get anything done because they're such a big country uh what is your suggestion if you are a us citizen and you are into crypto whether it's bitcoin bitcoin cash whatever it may be what do you tell those people they should do i think it's the same thing you've been telling people for years andrew go where you are treated best and i see a lot of these americans moving to puerto rico because they think that they're going to have a tax break well i don't trust the government you think that they're not going to change the rules of the game midway through the game on you they do it all the time right the outlawed gold ownership before them they seized everybody's gold they do all sorts of crazy stuff so if you think you're going to move to puerto rico and not have to pay capital gains tax on your crypto holdings i wish you good luck i hope you're right but uh man i think you're you're uh in for a bad time there especially if cryptocurrency continues to get more and more traction around the world uh i welcome you to antigua i welcome you to saint kitts i welcome you to anywhere in the world where you think you're going to be treated better than the us and at this point there's plenty of choices around the world probably most places and we'll talk more about this uh you know in mexico at the conference but i imagine a lot of people who they take the puerto rico option whether they're in your space or in my space there's this comfort of but i still have the u.s citizenship it's a baby step they feel like they're not giving something up is that maybe the way you what you see people doing it i think people feel that way and people are scared that though what if i can never go back to the u.s ever again and there's a whole other story and you can watch some other youtubes about it but i'm i'm literally a convicted violent felon in the united states right long story short i sold firecrackers on ebay as a teenager but i'm considered a violent felon in the u.s they gave me a 10-year multiple entry visa to be able to go to the u.s anytime i want i can spend multiple months there per year with no tax liability whatsoever so if they gave me a violent felon in the united states a 10-year multiple entry visa for the u.s just about anybody is going to be able to get a visa to go to the us so i don't think you have to be worried about not being able to visit the us ever again the first time they they they told you you couldn't go though well they did give me a little bit of a hard time when i applied at the embassy in barbados and i brought the all the paperwork with me showing my ties outside of the u.s big stack and they physically refused to allow me to slide them through the window for them to to look at and then they basically said no no no now we didn't see your evidence so because we haven't seen your evidence we're going to deny your visa so when i went and applied at the embassy in japan which had been home base for a while there on the very first try they approved my visa there and then i've renewed it a couple of times since then so uh my advice is uh maybe don't don't apply for your visa in barbados apply for in whatever country you're you're spending the majority of your time at that point uh and yeah they want you to go to your country of citizenship or i suppose residents and and so japan is can be some somewhat weird in terms of you know what is your resident status there they're probably in a lot better mood because they're not really rejecting too many japanese people in tokyo i think that and then also japanese just go japanese japanese culture is very you know by the book by the letter of everything and by the letter of the law i very clearly uh qualified for the visa and whereas in the caribbean maybe things are a bit you know faster and looser and lazier and you know do the absolute minimum which is uh not how things are in japan so i think the the letter of the law helped me in japan in that case are you saying if you're a us citizen and you have substantial crypto holdings that everyone should just renounce no it depends on you if you plan to live in the u.s for the for the rest of your life then you got to deal with that right it's a trade-off do you want to pay half your income uh you know every year in the u.s then stay in the u.s go ahead and do it if you're already not living in the u.s and you don't plan to move back there and in my case i knew i was never going to live in the u.s again i was pretty mad about the way i've been treated in the legal system there which is a whole other story but since i knew i was never moving back there again there was zero benefit for me to continuing to hold a u.s passport and uh if so if you're not living in the u.s some of these new crypto goods i would advise you to announce if you're not planning to live in the us ever again a lot of people tell me on social media though is but but of course you're missing the point of cryptocurrency i mean you who who knows you have it and i say well look at the new form 1040. do you have cryptocurrency i don't want to you know i don't want to be a guy you know committing perjury i don't know about you or anyone else i imagine you don't but what do you say to those people as someone who spent time in federal prison right i did 10 months in federal prison my advice to you is not to go there you do not want to go there it is not worth it if you were if you were a billionaire you would pay a billion dollars not to go to federal prison right the money isn't worth it the risk is not worth it uh philosophically you can make all sorts of arguments that you know taxation is theft or whatever else whether you buy into them or not that's a whole other story it's not worth it uh you know if don't mess around with these people these are violent people that will toss you in a cage and they don't care about you they don't care about your family they don't care about your business they'll gladly destroy your entire life to get you don't mess with these people do whatever it is that they're threatening you that you have to do and the the the best thing is to just remove yourself from their purview all together and and and get out of their hair and get out of their life and like i said that was the happiest day of my entire life when i felt like i was no longer in their purview when i renounced my u.s citizenship and if you're not living in the u.s do it again and and you know i've watched a lot of your videos andrew i think we have similar world views there but you're not going to change the politicians minds you're not going to do anything you just have to navigate the world that you're living in and yeah maybe the taxation is unfair maybe it's all this stuff but it's still the world you live in and you still might wind up in a real prison don't mess with that stuff just avoid it and find there's a great book by harry brown how i found freedom in an unfree world i really a fantastic book pick it up and it's a it's a great point of view changing book that will help you see the world a bit more clear that you can still find freedom in an unfree world and and that's what i think each of us should be doing without risking going to prison at the same time that's that's a whole other topic right people who have the world view of they've studied the us australia and canada and they say there's nowhere to go you and i are pretty libertarian but perhaps a little bit different than some of the folks who are even more extreme where there is a pragmatism and there is a why do you want to be somewhere where you're so unwelcome why do you want to potentially get into trouble and i think my thought on this increasingly is the government isn't as dumb as a lot of libertarians want to think they just don't care when it comes to taxing people you look at some of the most inefficient countries in the world they're a gem when it comes to taxing you yeah that's exactly right and if you when you start messing with the money they're going to be johnny on the spot to make sure it keeps coming and uh it's dangerous dangerous stuff to mess with it and i think that's part of why satoshi nakamoto decided to remain this uh anonymous figure but for me as a libertarian when i saw cryptocurrency as this amazing tool to bring more economic freedom with the world i knew it was dangerous to speak out in favor of it but it was just too exciting and too attractive to continue to be quiet which is what i had done you know after i got out of prison i was still a libertarian but i didn't talk to anybody about anything i did i kept my mouth shut my head low and just wanted to go about my life until bitcoin came along because it was basically kryptonite to the state and it became too exciting but uh luckily i'm in a jurisdiction where there aren't any direct taxes like that there's a sales tax here and an import duty but there's no capital gains tax or income tax here so i don't have to worry about those same sort of things any longer lastly what i wanted to ask you you know the other thing that i hear is you've obtained citizenship by investment thousand dollars i think it was more when you did it but now it's a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in sync kits there are other options like antigua uh st lucia which which i've done and and uh i'm looking at some others you know people who are holding crypto that's their entire net worth they say uh you know i'll tell them oh it's it's 2.7 bitcoin today to become citizen of xyz and they'll say well in a year it'll be one or it'll be half so i'll just wait and to me that sounds like a never-ending let me just push it off and let me find freedom later what do you what do you say to that based on your iphone analogy yeah the the longer you wait the harder it's going to be probably legally and then on your iphone analogy well yeah but you want it now right you don't you don't want to you don't want to wait another decade but here's here's the investment strategy advice here don't sell your crypto to buy this citizenship go and borrow against it right and then you can write off the interest payments as a tax deduction probably and go and get your you know your local us you know cpa tax advice on this but borrow against your crypto use the borrowed money to pay for the citizenship somewhere else and then renounce then your net worth is you know not any higher you didn't have to sell your crypto you still get the advantage of the gains there that's probably the the smart way to do it but you know go and go and seek your uh probably the nomad capitalist is probably a good place to get some help with uh that sort of thing but uh that would be the strategy i would use if i were still an american or as we've seen in the last year they make it very difficult to renounce oh we have coven sorry can't help you go away come back when the whole thing blows over yeah i have a good friend that just uh tried to renounce recently and they denied his and actually as a story from my own renunciation when i went into the embassy the guy that's you know job is to read me the the form there he he uh he uh asked me do you want to pay with cash credit card or bitcoin and i looked at him and i said how do you know i would be interested in paying with bitcoin he goes oh we know all about you oh they know everything and he did of course where did you do it this was in barbados and i told him i said well can i can i really pay in bitcoin he says no i was just kidding so at least he had a sense of humor a bit but then uh he went he went through these different things he had to caution me about and and whatnot and the the part that uh really caught my my attention there is that uh he said that you're not ask you're not telling them that you're announcing you're asking for their permission to stop being an american i said well does do you guys ever deny the request he goes oh yeah it happens all the time and that seemed really strange to me how could they possibly deny somebody telling them hey i'm stopping being an american thank you very much but apparently they claimed the right to tell you no you have to continue being an american and in fact that just happened to a friend of mine he went in and he had the the renunciation interview and he went through all of that and were they caution you oh you're not going to be able to collect social security anymore but they don't tell you the fact that you're not gonna have to pay social security taxes anymore um well that's true but uh i still get my statements i'm getting 1100 bucks a month in uh 2079 or something i can't wait good luck with that yeah but a friend of mine recently had his renunciation request denied and that was really shocking to to both of us there and the reason they gave is that oh it sounded like you weren't sure enough that you actually wanted to announce or some nonsense like that uh the guy was definitely sure about it uh and now he's gonna have to fight with him uh again and and try and renounce again but uh they're only making it more and more difficult more and more expensive more and more burdensome so my advice to you is uh do it sooner rather than later if you want to do it but the first step is get a second citizenship if you don't have that already that's the first step to ever renouncing so if you're even considering renouncing get a second citizenship first and you know andrew and your team fantastic place i assumed to do it i haven't used you directly but i love the content you put out there and uh i've been involved in this space pretty deeply myself for a while uh andrew and his team definitely seem to know what they're talking about and uh we've had a couple of your friends actually we've been really nice but uh that we've been been doing it for but uh yeah and i think it's it's gonna be more than the u.s in the future and i've been really happy happy and quotes to hear some attorneys around the world who are in this space agreeing with me and saying you're gonna see other countries going the way of the u.s i i can't say that i've heard too many people being rejected that does seem pretty rare uh rejected to even go in not rare but uh it'll be interesting to see what other countries do this uh roger vera where can we find you bitcoin.com yeah bitcoin.com if you want to read a little bit more about me and my prison experience and that sort of stuff rogerveer.com uh and then i have roger kveer on twitter if you want to follow me there but uh the best thing that you can do for me though too go and try and give cryptocurrencies a try go and send receive some send it with a friend the bitcoin.com wallet's a fantastic place to start but the the goal here is to empower every individual on the planet to have complete control over their own money so if you're a fan of the nomad capitalist uh well you need some nomad capitalistic money and that's cryptocurrency and uh go and give them a try for yourself and it'll really make your life better off because of it you go back to japan still i was going to there's a little bit of a coronavirus lockdown story there my my japanese visa expired and long story short is i don't have a visa for japan at the moment and they're restricting all foreigners from going there at the moment so i'm in the caribbean for for the moment we'll see what happens we should work on another passport and get you into japan uh i've had people have called and asked that they said like that's the one thing i want i want visa free access to japan and that's as you can attest not the easiest thing to get with some of these passports anyway roger thank you for uh for being with us my pleasure thank you for the opportunity and like subscribe and share andrew's content so you can help more people in the world become aware of this how can nomad accomplish help you four ways number one subscribe to our channel and click the notification bell to make sure you get our new video every day number two get a copy of nomad capitalist the book you'll learn a lot of my personal experiences over a dozen years of studying this stuff as well as exactly some of the strategies that you can use to build your nomad capitalist plan number three if you're not sure where to start but you want to come and learn from my team and i you want to come and mingle with like-minded people learn more about our live conference nomad capitalist live it's coming up soon and number four if you want some help right now because you've got a burning issue you need something solved you want to lower your taxes get a second passport or build the nomad capitalist lifestyle of your dreams go to nomadcapless.com and click on become a client

Channel: Nomad Capitalist

Views: 53,336

Rating: 4.7493768 out of 5

Keywords: nomad capitalist, go where you're treated best, interview, roger ver, bitcoin, cryptocurrency, cashing bitcoin, antigua, st kitts and nevis, st kitts citizenship by investment, citizenship by investment, cbi program, cbi, life in usa, living in usa, bitcoin news, taxes on crypto, crypto, successful people, habits of successful people, crypto payment, crypto cash, caribbean citizenship by investment, crypto trading, business advices, business, crypto investor, crypto business

Id: H2glSN6CnWQ

Length: 49min 42sec (2982 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 03 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Safe-Increase1578]

After many years of hodling, I actually made some transactions recently. I have to agree, for practical usage Bitcoin Cash was excellent.

[u/SmileBCH]

:)

[u/playfulexistence]

There's no such thing as a "Bitcoin vs Bitcoin Cash" debate.

Segshit is not Bitcoin.

[u/waxheartzZz]

so what do we need to do to get walmart to hold bch and also accept bch? this would basically end the game, while also giving them a competitive advantage in the online world in which they keep failing

[u/thegtabmx]

Listen, I'm all for Bitcoin Cash (which I believe is closer to the original Bitcoin), and dislike Bitcoin's reliance on a shaky hub-and-spoke L2, but we really got to stop with this same single dimension of comparison, that if applied between Bitcoin Cash and other chains, would put Bitcoin Cash at a disadvantage. Yes, the fees on Bitcoin Cash are currently cheaper than on Bitcoin, and this is likely to remain this way for the foreseeable future, but surely there are other things that can be used to compare the two chains and the same old talking point.

[u/alicenekocat]

Roger should not get involved with the scam artist known as Andrew Hendersson,

https://nomadcapitalistscam.com/

https://www.sitejabber.com/faq/nomadcapitalist.com/has-anyone-used-them-is-it-a-con

https://www.offshorecorptalk.com/threads/nomad-capitalist.20118/

[u/thr33mac]

Transferred LTC and BCH from my Ledger today. Both were very cheap, but LTC was much faster....