DECONOMY 2018: Roger Ver (BCH) vs. Samson Mow (BTC)

vtce (44)in #cryptocurrency • 6 years ago

This year’s DECONOMY conference was quite intense, especially the Roger Ver and Samson Mow debate on Bitcoin vs. Bitcoin Cash. It was also hilarious when Vitalik Buterin called out Craig Wright who claims to be Bitcoin’s founder, as the fake Satoshi. Without a doubt, Bitcoin Cash BCH, a hard fork of Bitcoin BTC, has solid support from among others Roger Ver and “faketoshi” Craig Wright. Then you have the hardcore supporters of the original or legacy Bitcoin BTC like Samson Mow. While the debate centered on which cryptocurrency would be the future, Ver pretty much outspoke everybody that night while Vitalik was tweeting pretty much everything going on. How can you shut-up a guy like Ver who has so much passion about BCH, while guys like Charlie Lee of Litecoin LTC are just so boring about their project. In fact it may be concerning for LTC holders when Lee starts talking nice stuff about Nano (Charlie don't shill, man, lol). Hot topic was the scaling debate in BTC. Samson Mow got things serious when he said: “I think the scaling that works is to take an engineering standpoint to look at the code and to follow consensus rules and build layer 2 solutions.” The problem with Roger Ver is that although he clearly points out that BCH is outperforming BTC because of transaction volume and lower transaction fees, the point Samson Mow wants to make is the theoretical foundations of the BTC network. Scaling can be solved in many different ways and Roger Ver is not convinced that off chain solutions are the way to go. Ver then points out how it is not even easy to buy coffee with BTC because no one accepts it, while BCH can be used to purchase coffee using a Starbucks gift card via a hosted wallet. Samson Mow’s point is that slow and steady wins the race, while Roger Ver believes that it is about following the original philosophy of BTC which is support for larger block sizes. While Satoshi Nakamoto did specify that the network can grow to support larger block sizes to handle transactions, there is going to be a fundamental problem from an engineering standpoint that Mow and the core BTC team have realized. With larger block sizes, the network effect may not scale in the future. Bigger block sizes can cause more traffic as well, like building a bigger freeway, but with so many cars it still gets heavy traffic. Nonetheless, Roger Ver still believes in BCH perhaps because he has plenty to gain from it. He is a big investor in hitBTC/antpool, cryptocurrency miners who support BCH. Ver also believes in larger block sizes to increase further the volume of transactions per second. Now let’s look at why that can be bad. When you increase block sizes you will need more storage on the blockchain. Now you need to have nodes that can store more data and a faster network as well. So this means that the storage size and network speed will have to catch up with block size. Larger blocks also make nodes more expensive to operate, thus the possibility of centralizing operations. In the end Roger Ver and Samson Mow were at a stalemate, though Ver was more vocal and fervent about his views. Mow was pretty chill for the most part, like his presence was there but his mind was on other things.