Roger Ver, a cryptocurrency angel investor and a well-known Bitcoin Cash proponent, recently made what can be seen as a faux pas, when he tried to gift Chinese economist Ba Shusong with small BCH donations that amounted to around $300-worth.
Using a meeting between the two as a chance to promote the cryptocurrency, he invited members of the Bitcoin Cash community to send small amounts of BCH to Shusong, who currently acts as Chief China Economist at the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
Ver presumably hoped the gesture would gain a new and high-profile fan for the cryptocurrency, but many interpreted the act as nothing short of a crowd sourced bribe.
On the May 21, Verpublished a now-deleted tweet that read:
‘I’m currently explaining Bitcoin Cash to @Shusong-Ba, the Chief Economist for the HK stock exchange. Show him how amazing BCH is by sending him some so he can tell his 9M Weibo followers about it.’
The cryptocurrency evangelist’s attempts to woo the Chinese economist and his Weibo followers seemingly backfired, as he found himself politely rebuffed, with Shusong writing shortly thereafter on popular Chinese microblogging platform Weibo:
'Today I met Roger Ver, the famous investor in Bitcoin Cash. He was keen to invite everyone around him to download the BCH wallet app and to teach us how to send and receive BCH. He said he would invite his fans to send several Chinese Yuan worth of BCH to my newly-created account. I thought he was joking, until I really received some cryptocurrencies at night. Thank you. But I have donated all BCH to a charitable foundation and deleted the account.'
A photo the renowned economist posted on Weibo shows that he received, in total, 0.31710013 BCH from the cryptocurrency’s community – a sum equating to around $300.
Such a rebuttal is to some unsurprising, as Shusong has in the past made his stance on Bitcoin and blockchain technology clear. The economist said in an interview prior to the event that “the original intention of a monetary system is not to make currency holders rich, but to make the transaction more convenient and to benefit the economy. But bitcoin does not bring us any of these benefits.”
As covered, Roger Ver has predicted Ethereum is set to surpass Bitcoin this year, as he argued “technologically superior” cryptocurrencies are going to see massive gains in the coming months or years, while BTC is set to fall behind. The entrepreneur was under fire last month, as hundreds of users prepared a lawsuit against him and his website Bitcoin.com. The lawsuit was eventually cancelled over a lack of donations.
Featured image credit: Max Pixel
