Bitcoin Cash (BCH) founder Roger Ver made a rare media appearance on Tuesday to pump a microcap altcoin, trash talk bitcoin, and explain how his alleged tax misfilings would have been the fault of his accountant.

Former Fox News anchor turned Republican media exec Tucker Carlson interviewed Ver for 40 minutes without challenging his claims, granting him unchecked airtime to frame his indictment as a conspiracy by intelligence agencies to silence him. Elon Musk amplified the broadcast.

The US Department of Justice alleges that Ver evaded approximately $50 million in taxes in 2017. Prosecutors claim that Ver purposefully withheld information, including $240 million worth of crypto transactions, from his accountant in order to avoid paying taxes. Ver is currently facing extradition from Spain for US mail fraud and tax evasion.

Read more: Roger Ver arrested for tax fraud while promoting Bitcoin book

During his interview with Carlson, Ver claimed that he renounced his American citizenship because he upholds American values.

“That’s exactly the value that America was founded on,” Ver said. “It was a bunch of British people that renounced their citizenship and said, ‘I don’t like the laws you guys are passing; I’m not going to be a part of this anymore.’ So renouncing your citizenship is actually one of the most patriotic, American-esque things you can possibly do.”

Carlson suggests US gov’t out to get Roger Ver

Carlson’s one-sided portrayal of Ver’s situation assumed that the US government has an interest in silencing Ver’s speech and subverting Bitcoin’s original promise of financial privacy.

“Maybe it’s not about the taxes,” Carlson opined. “Could there be another reason the US government is angry at you?”

Ver was happy to agree. “I think they’re just angry about my lack of obedience and lack of, y’know, kissing their ring. I was the first person in the world to begin investing in bitcoin… and invest in businesses that made it easy to use bitcoin as money.”

Using his maximum, 109-year sentence for rhetorical effect, Ver warned listeners that if they did not take action, such as visiting his website or signing his petition, he might spend the rest of his life in prison.

The real winner of Tucker Carlson’s interview: Zano

Ver, of course, spent his final years in the crypto industry promoting a fork of bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash (BCH), and a sequence of various altcoins. One such altcoin, Verse, held space on the homepage of his flagship bitcoin.com website for months.

Nowadays, Verse is down 97% from its all-time high. Ver’s BCH is similarly down 97% from its all-time high against bitcoin.

Read more: Roger Ver released on $160K bail as US seeks extradition

One of Ver’s latest darlings is Zano, some sort of next-generation privacy scaling solution for bitcoin, ether, and even user-created altcoins. The micro-cap coin curiously rallied for days ahead of Carlson’s interview that contains six shout-outs for Zano. 

Three months ago, Zano was worth less than $80 million. After Carlson’s interview, which has amassed over 2.5 million impressions on X and 170,000 views on YouTube at press time, Zano has rallied north of $180 million.

Roger Ver asks for help

The interview covered other topics, including the Blocksize Wars and earlier years of Bitcoin history. Carlson even asked Ver who he thinks is the real Satoshi Nakamoto.

“I don’t know, and if anybody knows, I’m not aware of that,” Ver responded. “Whoever he is, or they are, or she is, they deserve their privacy.”

Ver doubted that intelligence agencies had initially created Bitcoin. However, he believes that they eventually hijacked it.

Roger Ver has filed a motion to dismiss his criminal case alongside other attempts to prevent his extradition from Spain to the US. His attorneys argue that the exit tax and tax codes involved in his alleged violations were too vague. He also claims the US government violated his attorney-client privilege and infringed on his free speech.

In both his interview with Carlson and across his own channels, Ver urges the public to sign his petition as he fights criminal proceedings from Mallorca.

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The city editor of the Financial Times’ popular op-ed section, Alphaville, has apologized for its years of staunchly negative bitcoin (BTC) coverage. As the world’s largest crypto surpassed $100,000 per coin, they took a brief moment to self-reflect.

Then within seconds, they doubled down on their reporting.

In short, their mea culpa for discouraging millions of readers from buying BTC since 2011 (when one coin was worth $8) consisted of a single, backhanded sentence: “We’re sorry if at any moment in the past 14 years you chose based on our coverage not to buy a thing whose number has gone up.”

Sorry, not sorry!

Immediately prior to that non-apology, editor Bryce Elder reiterated his support for FT Alphaville’s doomsaying proclamations as BTC rallied 1,200,000% from the section’s June 2011 coverage. Mostly defending the reign of former editor, Isabella Kaminski, he reaffirmed, “We stand by every single one of those posts.”

According to Elder’s own summary of FT Alphaville’s publications over the last 13 years, BTC is “a negative-sum game,” “compromised as a store of value,” and “an arbitrary hype gauge.”

Read more: Bitcoin flippened silver and Saudi Aramco — are Google and Amazon next?

Indeed, today is a day of reckoning for many BTC doomsayers. Peter Schiff, Nouriel Roubini, Craig Wright, Jim Cramer, Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Jamie Dimon, and countless others predicted that the currency would never hit $100,000.

It has.

Whether someone chooses to self-reflect and apologize, or double-down on their belief, is up to them. BTC is now worth $2 trillion and has achieved a milestone in the history of internet-native money, surpassing the values of Visa, Berkshire Hathaway, Saudi Aramco, and Facebook.

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