Globetrotting bitcoin entrepreneur Roger Ver just made the largest ever charitable bitcoin donation — a million dollars — after ‘losing’ a bet he made with the world about its rise.
The CEO of MemoryDealers and angel investor actually made an initial bet of $10,000 (the value of 1,000 BTC at the time) but recent events have pushed the dollar value into seven figures, setting the record.
“A little over two years ago I made a bet for $10,000 that bitcoin would outperform gold, silver, the US stock market and the US dollar by more than one hundred times over the next two years,” he posted in a video message on YouTube.
“I’m here today to say that I was wrong, In reality it took about two years and two months for bitcoin to outperform everything else by more than a hundred times. Over that time, gold and silver are down, the stock market is up about 45 per cent, but Bitcoin is up more than 15,000 per cent, or more than three hundred times everything else.”
Despite the prediction being off by only a couple of months, Ver decided to obey the letter of the original bet on principle and donate the 1,000 BTC to the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), “the organization that published the books and articles that allowed me to understand just how important Bitcoin would become.”
His wager would have sounded crazy to an outsider in late 2011. Even though the bet was with the world in general and not any one (unlucky) individual, Ver said no one offered to bet against him.
“One person offered to take the other side after about 85% of the time had already elapsed though,” he said.
That someone was still prepared to take the other side as recently as that is a mark of how much the scenery has changed in the past few months.
In his video, Ver went on to point out the tens of millions of dollars in investment that has flowed to businesses like BitPay, Coinbase and Blockchain.info as they expand into countries around the world. There are now millions of individual bitcoin users who can now use their digital currency for over 70,000 stores on Shopify, or organize their own trades via LocalBitcoins.com.
Ver is one of a fast-growing number of professionals and others whose full-time employment is now based on bitcoin, as it continues to captivate even the non-technology-minded in media, government and the general public.
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