LONDON—Roger Ver, the CEO of Bitcoin.com, was served with a lawsuit today by Craig Wright for calling him a fraud and a liar in a YouTube video—which has since been removed by YouTube.
Wright has been filing lawsuits against many people in the crypto space, including Peter McCormack, an anonymous Twitter user called Hodlonaut and Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum.
Ver was served at a spontaneous London Bitcoin Cash meetup this evening. And Decrypt happened to be on the scene. So we asked if Ver will fight it.
“Of course,” he said. “I think i’m going to put out another video calling him a fraud and a liar again,” he told Decrypt, adding, “I’m not worried one bit. I’m annoyed I have to spend some money on the lawsuit rather than hire one developer to build more tools to bring more economic freedom to the world.”
Like many other critics, Ver said he disagreed with Wright’s strategy of suing people in the crypto industry, which he’s been doing in an apparent campaign to prove that he is Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious and anonymous inventor of Bitcoin.
Ver said that Wright’s litigiousness was bad for Bitcoin SV, the cryptocurrency supported by the Australian computer scientist. A number of exchanges have delisted Bitcoin SV, to protest Wright’s legal bullying, including Binance, Kraken and ShapeShift. However, Ver did not think this was necessarily the right response.
Indeed, he said he supported the Bitcoin SV project and people working with it but argued that this kind of bad press won’t encourage its growth.
“If you’re busy suing everybody, people aren’t going to be your friend. It’s that simple. Look at the lawsuits, all the exchanges that delisted SV,” he said, adding that he felt the exchanges were behaving unfairly. “I don’t think it was a good thing. If people want to trade it, I think people should be able to trade it,” he said. “Free the market, free the world. If you want to trade Bitcoin SV, go for it.”