On September 16-23rd the Bitcoin Foundation will be holding the final elections for two seats on the board of directors for the Industry and Individual seats.

In this video, Bitcoin expert and enthusiast Roger Ver who is a founding member of the Bitcoin Foundation and major financial contributor endorses Trace Mayer for the Individual seat and they discuss the vision and future of the Foundation and how the financial capital should be allocated.

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TRANSCRIPT

Trace Mayer: Hi, guys, this is Trace Mayer and I’ve got Roger Ver on the line. How are you doing, Roger?

Roger Ver: Hi, Trace.

Trace Mayer: I don’t take anyone’s time or attention for granted so figure I’ll just get straight to the point. You’re a founding member of the Bitcoin Foundation. You’ve donated over 5,000 Bitcoins. I’m running for the individual seat. I’m not going to be anybody’s submissive little lapdog on there anyways. What I want is to ask for your endorsement for this foundation seat.

Roger Ver: Yeah, for everybody who doesn’t know, Trace has been involved in Bitcoin since I believe way back in 2010. I’ve known him for over a year now, which is ages in the Bitcoin world. I think he’s a great guy. He understands Bitcoin through and through. He has the right ideology. I think he’d be great for it. That’s not to say I don’t like the other candidates. I don’t really know any of them, but I know Trace really well and I think he would do a great job, and he’ll have my vote.

Trace Mayer: And with that, we’re also involved in some similar investments together. We’ve been involved in Bitcoin for a long time, like you said. In fact, there are probably times when one or two of us were the only real market-makers, right?

Roger Ver: I think even more important than that though is the fact that you actually understand Bitcoin and you have the right ideology that drove everybody to get Bitcoin started and get it to where it is today, and we want to make sure that that continues on into the future. Because if it doesn’t have that, it’s not really worth anything.

Trace Mayer: Well, yeah, because Bitcoin drives down those costs in terms of time, money and privacy, and when we’re looking at how we want to allocate the capital that’s in the Bitcoin Foundation, a lot of that capital that you’ve contributed personally, we have to figure out how to get the highest ROI on that. So are there any particular areas that might be of interest to you and how you want to see that capital allocated?

Roger Ver: Yeah, the over 5,000 Bitcoins that I put in there, I would love to see are being put towards improving the overall robustness of Bitcoin itself rather than pleading with permission from other people to be able to use our Bitcoins. So the whole idea behind Bitcoin is to have a network that’s not controllable or regulatable directly by any other third party, and that’s where I want to see my money being spent, and I think Trace shares a similar view there.

Trace Mayer: I’m not necessarily opposed to any type of lobbying or things like that. I just think that particularly if regulators or law enforcement or members of government want to interact with the Bitcoin Foundation, and they want to get any knowledge or skills or expertise from us, I think they should pay us for that. We don’t necessarily need to pay to go teach them about this highly technical, highly complex subject.

  They can write us a check, send us some Bitcoins even, if they feel comfortable doing that, and we’ll go teach them about it. But I don’t necessarily think we need to pay for plane tickets and hotel rooms and high-priced lobbyists when we could instead by allocating that capital towards building out things that will make the protocol more robust or even additional tools that might be useful for actors in the Bitcoin community and whatnot.

Roger Ver: I agree. My main interest and I think the key is to making the strongest, most secure Bitcoin protocol imaginable, that’s what the goal should be. Not worrying about what other people are doing. We need to focus on building the strongest, best Bitcoin protocol possible.

Trace Mayer: Yeah, and I like to kind of call it defensive protection. We just need to have this impenetrable defensive protection so that we don’t have to necessarily worry about people who want to be predatory in one way or another against us or our assets. Yeah, I’m definitely on the same page there.

Roger Ver: We need to make sure that Bitcoin lives up to being the honey badger of money.

Trace Mayer: A honey badger cloaked in mithril right? Yeah, so is there anything else you would like to hit on before we close this out?

Roger Ver: I think that is about it. But thank you for your efforts in the Bitcoin world. They are greatly appreciated.

Trace Mayer: Okay, thanks Roger.

[End of Audio]