A discussion on Bitcoin scalability at the Distributed Economy Convention (Deconomy) 2018 saw Bitcoin.com CEO Roger Ver and Blockstream chief strategy officer Samson Mow trading words in a fiery debate that provoked multiple reactions from the crypto community.
Ver vs Mow
During the debate, Roger Ver argued that the scaling of Bitcoin was a “natural” process on the blockchain. He noted that the increase of block size should not be avoided if the number of transactions required it to expand. Ver highlighted the difference between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, saying that Bitcoin would never achieve a role as an everyday payment currency, while Bitcoin Cash had the potential to do so.
Samson Mow retorted, saying, “We have to take into consideration the computer science aspect of it. We can’t just make things up.’’. As Mow sees it, increasing block size cannot be a final solution, as it has the potential to inflate the chain weight.
The alternative would be a secondary layer of technology cryptographically embedded into the original chain, enabling the process to continue to synchronize transactions with nodes relatively quickly. He also praised the possibility of a solution arising from Bitcoin utilizing Lightning, and the actions of Bitcoin Core.
Ver replied by stating that “Bitcoin Core is having negative merchant adoption around the world”, as opposed to the merchant adoption of Bitcoin Cash. This led him to accuse Bitcoin Core of having a “negative and incredibly damaging [effect on] Bitcoin”, declaring that he had empirical evidence to back up his claims.
He noted that it was easier for merchants to move to altcoins rather than to adopt Lightning support to the Bitcoin payment option, saying the latter would be expensive and unreliable.
The tone of the debate changed as Ver proceeded to accuse Mow’s Bitcoin Core team of having “shattered the Bitcoin ecosystem into a thousand and one different altcoins and delayed the adoption of cryptocurrencies around the world by years”.
Mow defended the notion that Bitcoin could be a valid payment option for everyone in the future, but needed time to develop, as does Lightning. He predicted that with a broader implementation of Lightning, transaction fees were bound to change, saying “like the weather, it can be hot one day, cooler the next day and windy and rainy”.
Rather than sparking a conversation within the community on the topic of debate, online reactions focused predominantly on Ver’s and Mow’s behavior with each other on stage.
Awesome debate! The contempt @SamsonMow has for @rogerkver and Bitcoin Cash is so palpable. He barely makes eye contact with Roger.
I love Rogers passionate debating skills. He's a spartan. #BitcoinCashMC #Bitcoin #CryptoKid #BCH @BTCNewsUpdates https://t.co/xF1MN5YkgY— Krishool (@krishool) April 4, 2018
I was in the room for this and will have my own version coming out soon. watch the video….Samson comes across as a talking head….the Sean Spicer of Crypto:https://t.co/SCVP8YlyKk
— Calvin Ayre (@CalvinAyre) April 4, 2018
The two-day event, which ended on 4 April in Seoul, South Korea, invited entrepreneurs and leading industry figures to discuss the future of blockchain and related fields while hosting debates on recent industry conflicts.
Bitcoin scalability is a persistent issue of the currency, arising from an ever-increasing number of transactions on the blockchain and the problematic nature of validating them quickly enough.
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