Following the pattern of very rich bitcoiners who fail to pay their taxes and somehow get arrested in Span, Roger Ver has just been detailed for exactly that, according to reports.

First of all we have the report from Ver's own newspaper, bitcoin.com (LOL!):

On April 30, 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) detained Roger Ver, a trailblazing investor in bitcoin, on accusations of tax evasion and submitting fraudulent tax returns. The following update is accompanied by a statement from Bitcoin.com regarding the allegations against the company’s founder.

Bitcoin Investor Roger Ver Charged With Tax Evasion
According to the DOJ press release, by 2014, Roger Ver and his companies, Memorydealers and Agilestar, reportedly controlled over 131,000 bitcoins, each valued at about $871. Memorydealers and Agilestar allegedly maintained control of approximately 73,000 of those bitcoins. However, he is accused of supplying misleading information to legal and valuation experts to minimize these assets’ declared value.

This alleged misstatement, according to the U.S. government, resulted in underreported company tax returns and the evasion of the mandatory “exit tax” on capital gains from his worldwide assets. Ver was apprehended in Spain, and the DOJ declared that the government intends to extradite him to face trial in the United States.

And then the newspaper predictably defended him:

Statement From Bitcoin.com
“In light of the recent news, we want to underscore that these legal matters pertain solely to Roger and have no bearing on Bitcoin.com. While we cannot comment on the specifics of the allegations, we stand by Roger and his contributions to the cryptocurrency space,” a Bitcoin.com spokesperson told our newsdesk.

“Importantly, these legal proceedings do not affect our operations or the services we provide. Bitcoin.com remains steadfast in our mission of making money accessible to everyone, everywhere, without limits. Our commitment to this mission remains unwavering. This litigation does not affect our operations or the services we provide. Our non-custodial wallet ensures that users always maintain control of their funds,” the spokesperson added.

What is this statement supposed to be, the editor talking to himself? I find it quite funny that Bitcoin.com needs to talk to its spokesperson in order to write about this.

Stripe is considered as a big payment platform and its foray into cryptocurrency can be meet with a lot of excitement and possibilities. Alas, I can see that this company is really wading so carefully and do not want to fast-track things maybe to avoid possible mistakes and to make sure it is not upsetting its own market. So one might be asking: how big is Stripe and can it make a recognizable impact in case it would go crypto in full blast? According to this published material: Based in 2022, there are 1.32 million active websites globally using Stripe, with an average of 1,000 companies joined Stripe each day. Stripe processed a global payment volume of $817 billion and as of January 2024, Stripe is valued at $50 billion. Let's hope that there will be more on this development and that all Stripe users will be able to one day use crypto as an option to pay, aside from the usual fiat money. It must be noted that in my country, Stripe has no legal business operation and I am really wondering why it is not attracted to this small but growing market in the Asia-Pacific region.

I heard that Stripe used to do Bitcoin payouts (and checkouts possibly?) until about 2018 or so during the infamous rise and crash of the Bitcoin price. They pulled out because they said that Bitcoin's price was too volatile. I don't think we will ever see Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency checkouts on Stripe barring something extraordinary happening.

Naturally, this was the only outcome we could've expected from the SEC because when was the last time you have seen them make a speedy decision about crypto? That's right, when it causes massive damage, and only to restrict certain types from use. (See for example Terra Luna).

They have done this delaying nonsense with the Bitcoin ETFs too, until their floodgates burst.

Having seen other Bitcoin Mixers, I think UniJoin is unique in the fact that it uses anonymous addresses as outputs,

There is no such thing as an anonymous address in Bitcoin. We don't have such an address. There are legacy addresses, various kinds of segwit addresses like Nested and Native segwit and we have taproot addresses, but none of these addresses hides the scriptpubkey section of the outputs which is one of the necessary steps to have an anonymous kind of address.

Once upon a time, Wasabi Wallet was one of the most formidable, if not the most private wallet the Bitcoin community had to offer. It ran your bitcoins through WabiSabi, a CoinJoin protocol, and it "mixed" (if you want to call it that) your coins for you and gave you clean coins. Just like many of these mixers that you see advertised around here.

Unfortunately, Wasabi, like many other mixers and coinjoiners, had one inherent and fatal flaw - It ran a centralized coordinator. It was not decentralized at all.

This means that not only can law enforcement destroy a coordinator, but the coordinator itself can sabotage it's own users.

This is exactly what happened with Wasabi Wallet. While zkSNACKs, the owner of the coordinator, was busy preparing its draft announcing its intent to blacklist UTXOs that it doesn't like, the community was aloof of this news.

Of course, they were very angry when they found out about this, because there were no criteria for blacklisting a UTXO, not to mention the entire concept of blacklisting was unethical in the first place, so that basically meant that zkSNACKs could make up the rules on the fly for what UTXOs they would like to block.

Believe it or not, this is old news. It happened 4 years ago.

Since then, a couple of sockpuppets have taken it upon themselves to defend Wasabi of any wrongdoing, justifying harvesting your UTXO set for this purpose while decrying competing wallets doing the same. You can find these accounts on many platforms, like X and bitcointalk.

Fast forward to today, and now Wasabi announced that no American is allowed to use the Wasabi wallet or access their website.

I am sure you are shaking your head at this point thinking "but I thought only exchanges do that kind of stuff!" Well, that was the case for all KYC-verified services for a long time, but at least they had the excuse of obeying the law. Now though, even anonymous services are hiding from US users, not out of legal obligation, but out of fear. It has never been illegal for Americans to own bitcoin, even though the government wants a tax cut out of all bitcoin transactions at this point, which is not hard to see.

I actually think nopara73 (Wasabi founder) ran away from Wasabi Wallet because he saw this coming. I guess he didn't want his reputation to be further in the mud or something.

Do not use any bitcoin wallet that geoblocks its users. Bitcoin is a global, permissionles, decentralized, P2P electronic cash.

Reddit has incorrectly reported that Stripe is enabling crypto payments for all customers (i.e. people who buy stuff). This is false. The actual news from many outlets including TechCrunch:

Stripe, the fintech giant, continues to inch its way back into the cryptocurrency market. On Thursday the company announced that it would let customers accept cryptocurrency payments, starting with just one currency in particular, USDC stablecoins, initially only on Solana, Ethereum and Polygon. This will be the first time that Stripe has taken crypto payments since 2018, when it dropped support for Bitcoin due to it being too unstable.

Stripe in 2022 tried its first reentry into the crypto market when it announced payouts (but not payments) in USDC, with Twitter as its marquee customer for the service. Thursday’s news has no customer names attached to it.

That's right, this USDC support is only for the Stripe merchants themselves. It is not for the consumers at all. In fact, nothing has changed for them, it is still business as usual.

Although, I won't deny that it would be a coup if you could suddenly start paying for subscriptions via Stripe using crypto.

I know most people don't understand anything about Bitcoin Script, so I will try to explain this as best as I can.

When you create a transaction, the outputs of the transactions have scripts attached to them, which contain instructions that an input must replicate in order to unlock those inputs for signing.

Mostly the script looks something like OP_DUP OP_HASH160 OP_PUSH <some hash> OP_EQUALVERIFY OP_CHECKSIG or maybe OP_DUP OP_PUSH <some hash> OP_EQUAL.

Scripts can take inputs, which are stored on a stack, similar to a programming language, which is created when a Bitcoin Core node verifies a transaction and is destroyed when verification is completed.

Ever since the introduction of Taproot, people have been finding rather creative uses for these opcodes. One of these led to the creation of Ordinals.

However, having opcodes that can do complex operations will save fees on the bitcoin network and will allow more transactions to be mined in the same block at once (due to something called "sigops"). OP_CAT is one such opcode: It combines the two highest values on the stack.

For example, if the stack looks like this:

NotA
Tether

then OP_CAT will delete these two values and put "NotATether" on the stack.

Or if the stack is

Not
A
Tetether

and you do two OP_CATs, then it will also create NotATether. (first NotA, Tether and then the complete string NotATether).

The good news is, OP_CAT finally has a BIP number, BIP 347, and that means that the BIP is under serious consideration.

It might even be added into the Bitcoin protocol again. It was first disabled by Satoshi Nakamoto himself very early on in Bitcoin's life.

https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2024/04/24/op-cat-proposal-to-bring-smart-contracts-to-bitcoin-finally-gets-a-bip-number/

I mean, who can possibly forget this moment if you have seen it on television.

Clearly the guys on the left and right of the Bitcoin Sign Guy are either smirking or staring disapprovingly at it, which makes it all the more comical.

Well recently, it has been put on auction, and the winning bid was for 16BTC, which is about $1,000,000 in US dollars.

https://www.coindesk.com/business/2024/04/25/buy-bitcoin-sign-sold-for-over-1m-at-auction/

I hope the buyer enjoys his new ownership of this piece of Bitcoin history.