a firecracker and a pest
repellent—on eBay. Roger
had
bought
the
product
himself through the mail and
he and his lawyer became
convinced
that
the
government was targeting
Roger because of remarks he
had made at a political rally,
where he had called federal
agents murderers. He would
be the only person arrested
for
selling
Pest
Control
Report 2000 through the mail
and the prosecutors showed
no leniency. Hit with felony
charges, he was sentenced to
ten months in prison after
agreeing to plead guilty.
The experience turned
Roger’s libertarian ideas from
a political cause to a personal
crusade—he
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.
Japan’s
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 Free Talk 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 Roger’s. 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 life—the Galt’s 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 Roger’s 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 and sold 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
Roger’s
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 York—
one Jed had set up—to begin
buying Bitcoins. Over the
next three days, Roger’s
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
Dealers’ 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 “We Accept Bitcoin,”
over the Memory Dealers
web address. The crowd on
the forums went wild.
“God I love Bitcoin!” one
user wrote.
“We needed this,” another
said.
Roger
said
he
was
looking to do even more: “I
promise I’m doing whatever I
can to help make Bitcoin
succeed (Billboards, National
radio ads, etc.).”
Roger’s appearance on
the scene coincided with the
first
mainstream
news
coverage for Bitcoin, which
helped push the price up, and,
in
turn,
led
to
more
mainstream news coverage.
In the first such article, on
Time magazine’s website,
Jerry Brito, a fellow at the
libertarian-oriented Mercatus
Center at George Mason
University, was given space
to discuss why Bitcoin might
matter:
Law-abiding citizens
can carry on their
affairs without anyone
snooping on them or
telling them what they
can and can’t do.
Want to contribute to
WikiLeaks or some
other politically
unpopular
organization? No
problem. Live under a
repressive regime and
want to buy a
repressed book or
movie? Here’s how.
No wonder the
Electronic Frontier
Foundation calls
Bitcoin “a censorship-
resistant digital
currency.”
A few days later Forbes
magazine did its own lengthy
and positive story on Bitcoin,
noting
that