crusadeâhe believed the government was out to get him. In prison, Roger taught himself Japanese, and the day his probation was up he flew to Japan to start a new life, free from the United States government. Japanâs orderliness appealed to him. That and he had a thing for Japanese women.
It was during a brief trip back to California to see his family that Roger sat down to breakfast listening to a month-old FreeTalk Live podcast on his iPod. When the hosts started talking about Bitcoin, something snagged in his mind and he stopped what he was doing. Many Bitcoin fanatics would later talk about their ecstatic moments of conversion to the Bitcoin cause, but few were as extreme as Rogerâs. While the podcast was still playing, Roger did a search for Bitcoin on the laptop he had on his kitchen table and began making his way through everything he could find.
He was so entranced by the idea of a financial system outside the control of the government that he read clear through the night to the next day. After a short nap, he began reading again and went on reading for a few days until he eventually felt so weak, and so gripped by a sickness taking over his throat, that he called a friend and asked to be taken to the hospital. There he was connected to an IV sack that pumped antibiotics and sedatives into him. It might have been the drugs, but as he lay in his hospital bed, he felt he had found a kind of promised land that he had been waiting for all of his short lifeâthe Galtâs Gulch he had been searching for like a libertarian Indiana Jones.
Roger had an intuitive sense of the way markets worked long before he had developed his market-centric ideology. When Roger was in fifth grade, he cornered the market on Lindy dollars, a school-wide currency named for a beloved teacher, after realizing that a Lindy dollar was not worth the same as a real dollar, as most students assumed. Using his Lindy dollars, Roger bought up all the Rice Krispies treats and brownies at the school bake sale and once there were no other sellers, jacked up their prices. The other students quickly paid Rogerâs prices, realizing they had no other use for their Lindy dollars.
Roger launched a business, Memory Dealers, during his first year at De Anza College in Cupertino, just after the tech bubble burst, when bankrupt companies began selling their computer hardware cheap. He scooped up all the hardware he could find andsold it online. The business became so successful that he dropped out of school after his first year. By the time he discovered Bitcoin, his company had thirty employees and sales of around $10 million a year, which paid for Rogerâs Lamborghini Gallardo and his luxury apartment in Tokyo, just a few blocks from the flashing, teeming transit hub and commercial district of Shibuya.
In April 2011, after hearing about Bitcoin on Free Talk Live , he used his fortune to dive into Bitcoin with a savage ferocity. He sent a $25,000 wire to the Mt. Gox bank account in New Yorkâone Jed had set upâto begin buying Bitcoins. Over the next three days, Rogerâs purchases dominated the markets and helped push the price of a single coin up nearly 75 percent, from $1.89 to $3.30.
At the same time that he was buying, Roger announced on the Bitcoin forums that his computer hardware company, Memory Dealers, would immediately begin accepting payment in Bitcoin. Not long after that, he turned a regular Memory Dealersâ advertisement that he paid for on Free Talk Live into an advertisement for Bitcoin and crowdsourced the copy for the ad from the Bitcoin forums. Soon enough, he had put up a gold-and-black billboard, on the side of an expressway in Silicon Valley, with an enormous Bitcoin emblem and the phrase âWe Accept Bitcoin,â over the Memory Dealers web address. The crowd on the forums went wild.
âGod I love Bitcoin!â one user wrote.
âWe needed this,â another said.
Roger said he
It was during a brief trip back to California to see his family that Roger sat down to breakfast listening to a month-old FreeTalk Live podcast on his iPod. When the hosts started talking about Bitcoin, something snagged in his mind and he stopped what he was doing. Many Bitcoin fanatics would later talk about their ecstatic moments of conversion to the Bitcoin cause, but few were as extreme as Rogerâs. While the podcast was still playing, Roger did a search for Bitcoin on the laptop he had on his kitchen table and began making his way through everything he could find.
He was so entranced by the idea of a financial system outside the control of the government that he read clear through the night to the next day. After a short nap, he began reading again and went on reading for a few days until he eventually felt so weak, and so gripped by a sickness taking over his throat, that he called a friend and asked to be taken to the hospital. There he was connected to an IV sack that pumped antibiotics and sedatives into him. It might have been the drugs, but as he lay in his hospital bed, he felt he had found a kind of promised land that he had been waiting for all of his short lifeâthe Galtâs Gulch he had been searching for like a libertarian Indiana Jones.
Roger had an intuitive sense of the way markets worked long before he had developed his market-centric ideology. When Roger was in fifth grade, he cornered the market on Lindy dollars, a school-wide currency named for a beloved teacher, after realizing that a Lindy dollar was not worth the same as a real dollar, as most students assumed. Using his Lindy dollars, Roger bought up all the Rice Krispies treats and brownies at the school bake sale and once there were no other sellers, jacked up their prices. The other students quickly paid Rogerâs prices, realizing they had no other use for their Lindy dollars.
Roger launched a business, Memory Dealers, during his first year at De Anza College in Cupertino, just after the tech bubble burst, when bankrupt companies began selling their computer hardware cheap. He scooped up all the hardware he could find andsold it online. The business became so successful that he dropped out of school after his first year. By the time he discovered Bitcoin, his company had thirty employees and sales of around $10 million a year, which paid for Rogerâs Lamborghini Gallardo and his luxury apartment in Tokyo, just a few blocks from the flashing, teeming transit hub and commercial district of Shibuya.
In April 2011, after hearing about Bitcoin on Free Talk Live , he used his fortune to dive into Bitcoin with a savage ferocity. He sent a $25,000 wire to the Mt. Gox bank account in New Yorkâone Jed had set upâto begin buying Bitcoins. Over the next three days, Rogerâs purchases dominated the markets and helped push the price of a single coin up nearly 75 percent, from $1.89 to $3.30.
At the same time that he was buying, Roger announced on the Bitcoin forums that his computer hardware company, Memory Dealers, would immediately begin accepting payment in Bitcoin. Not long after that, he turned a regular Memory Dealersâ advertisement that he paid for on Free Talk Live into an advertisement for Bitcoin and crowdsourced the copy for the ad from the Bitcoin forums. Soon enough, he had put up a gold-and-black billboard, on the side of an expressway in Silicon Valley, with an enormous Bitcoin emblem and the phrase âWe Accept Bitcoin,â over the Memory Dealers web address. The crowd on the forums went wild.
âGod I love Bitcoin!â one user wrote.
âWe needed this,â another said.
Roger said he
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