Roger Ver on MTGOX Bankruptcy and Bitcoin
Channel: Roger Ver
Date: 2014-02-26

Transcript:  
Hello,
I'm Roger Ver,  long time Bitcoin proponent.
About 7 months ago, purely as a favor to Mtgox,  I made a video stating that their fiat withdrawal problems were not being caused by a lack of liquidity.  I made no claims regarding their solvency.  While everything I said in the video was factually true, today I have come to regret making it for them.  It ended up causing the community put additional trust in an entity that deserved none.  As someone who personally had a life changing amount of bitcoins stuck in Mtgox,  I can fully understand the anger felt by the community when the news broke that Mtgox had lost nearly all of the bitcoins their customers had on deposit. I'm very sorry for the people around the world who have lost money because of this, but we need to understand the whole picture.  This issue was caused by poor programming skills and a total lack of book keeping on the part of Mtgox.  It was caused by a single mismanaged company, not by any problem with Bitcoin itself.  In fact, today Bitcoin is stronger than ever before. We've all learned not to store large amounts of funds in wallets we don't control.  We no longer have to deal with an exchange that can't process withdrawals in a timely manner, takes months to respond to support requests,  and who's prices deviate wildly from the other exchanges.   We've had the recent wonderful announcements that Playboy, http://TigerDirect.com, and http://Overstock.com are now accepting Bitcoin.  Long time business professional Barry Silbert of http://SecondMarket.com will be opening a first rate Bitcoin exchange this summer, and traditional incubators such as http://Boost.vc, http://plugandplaytechcenter.com/, and http://500.co Startups are focusing on creating hundreds of new Bitcoin businesses. The future is brighter than ever before.

From here on out,  I would like to ask people to realize that the answers to our problems don't depend on lawyers writing more laws enforced arbitrarily by countless regulators who use them to help their friends and punish their enemies.  We already have more than enough of that in this world.  We need to focus on voluntary cooperation, using trustless systems in which one group of people don't have arbitrary control over others.  Bitcoin and Ethereum, provide us with the tools we need to build this more peaceful, and prosperous future.  I look forward to working with all of you to make it a reality.

Today is Feb 26th 2014

Original video on Mtgox liquidity: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UP1YsMlrfF0

Learn more about Bitcoin at https://www.bitcoin.com