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Samson Mow

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2020-12-16
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2020-12-16
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  1. “Exactly. Even the people that use it, like just transacting and holding Bitcoin, even if you're not a full node, you still decide because you are that economic might that gives it value. So similar to how some miners misunderstood originally. So during the first halving when Bitcoin supplies have, some of the miners said, nah, we like 50 Bitcoins per block reward. We're not going to go with 25. And they ran a different fork and nobody cared because with old, we don't recognize your change to the protocol to give yourself more rewards. It is predetermined and that is the path forward. But this is a very slippery slope. If you can change the block size for reasons, no matter how good your reasons are, then you can change the supply of Bitcoin from 21 to 42 or whatever you like. And there's always a good reason to do something. There's always a palatable reason for the masses. Like there are not enough Bitcoin for everyone in the world to have one full Bitcoin. And that kind of argument will resonate.”

    2020-12-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC004: Bitcoin Tech & Future Growth w/ Blockstream's Samson Mow (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “I think the crux of that whole thing was can somebody come in and change the code? Can companies band together and dictate a change? Because when Armstrong was leading this charge, Brian Armstrong of Coinbase, he was basically saying this is an upgrade. And we companies have decided. And there was a lot of power behind that. They had the mining pools to Jihan Wu from Bitmain was backing this heavily. Coinbase was a huge player at that time. Blockchain.com.info, those guys as well. But this was a question like who controls Bitcoin? Who dictates the future of Bitcoin and where it goes? And that question was answered. It's the users ultimately.”

    2020-12-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC004: Bitcoin Tech & Future Growth w/ Blockstream's Samson Mow (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “It's about the evolution of money. I think it's commonly accepted. Nick Savo has written a lot of papers about this. Money is first evolved as a collectible, then it becomes a store of value. Then you have the medium of exchange phase and then unit of account. And I think you were mentioning Roger Vera. He's argued very publicly that it needs to be the medium of exchange first and the store of value second. Common sense dictates that that's not the case. You could use anything as a medium of exchange, but it won't necessarily be a store of value. And as an example, you can look at the hyperinflating currencies of some failing countries, right? Like the Venezuelan Bolivar, like that's a great medium of exchange. Everyone in the country uses it, but it's not a store of value and you can't go backwards.”

    2020-12-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC004: Bitcoin Tech & Future Growth w/ Blockstream's Samson Mow (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “About people living in third world countries being able to transact for free. It's all their fault. But at the end, we saw we had lots of companies band together into this big alliance. Coinbase, Bitco, a number of companies under DCG, and they formed this coalition that was pushing SegWit2X.”

    2020-12-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC004: Bitcoin Tech & Future Growth w/ Blockstream's Samson Mow (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Whether it's right or wrong. This was like an ongoing conflict, and once Bitcoin XT failed to get traction, another one came out, Bitcoin Classic, Bitcoin Unlimited, and then Segwit 2X. But all of these were efforts to change the block size and change the protocol and change things that were already set. A common theme during this era was the Bitcoin developers and Blockstream extension, because Blockstream often gets conflated in all of these arguments with Bitcoin development because there were a lot of developers, Bitcoin Core developers at Blockstream. But the argument was like, you guys don't want to compromise, but it wasn't really the point. Like that was never the case. You can't really say the developers don't want to compromise because as we learned at the end, at the culmination of the scaling civil war, it's the users that matter. So this was kind of a false argument saying those guys, those developers, they want to control the protocol. They don't want to increase the size. They don't care about.”

    2020-12-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC004: Bitcoin Tech & Future Growth w/ Blockstream's Samson Mow (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “It's a very long story. There were several different upgrades that came out, quote unquote upgrades that came out, and there were sides, lines were drawn in the sand of who was a big blocker and small blocker. So there's this division of people that wanted the block small because as you were saying, it is important. And I think even today, I don't think people fully understand the importance of why you want anybody to be able to sync up a full node. Because once you become a centralized service, you can't really decentralize yourself, right? every Bitcoin node is in a server farm, well, that's really no different than the legacy financial system where you trust the bank. You ask the bank, how much money do I have? The bank tells you you've got a thousand bucks. That's it. End of discussion.”

    2020-12-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC004: Bitcoin Tech & Future Growth w/ Blockstream's Samson Mow (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Well, there's two ways you can look at that. The optimistic way is that these guys wanted to scale Bitcoin. And they're coming out with the best of intentions that they want higher TPS and they want to scale it to the point where a billion people could use Bitcoin on-chain transactions for pennies on the dollar. And then the more nuanced approach is it was a power play because of this struggle with the other developers because of disagreements and possibly their lack of ability. And then the even more darker way is this was the first attempt to co-op Bitcoin to centralize it to basically hard fork it and exert control over at the protocol level because once you do that then there is really no going back. You've set yourselves down this path where you can upgrade it at any time and then you kind of become like Ethereum, which is willy-nilly upgrades. Anybody can change a number and it's largely meaningless. There is no email.”

    2020-12-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC004: Bitcoin Tech & Future Growth w/ Blockstream's Samson Mow (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Beginning of the genesis is really an effort to fork off Bitcoin and tell everyone that we're upgrading. So I forgot if it was Gavin or Mike. One of them contacted me back then. I was the CEO of BTC China or BTCC, which was one of the largest exchanges and mining pools. And they were contacting me because they said, we're upgrading now. It's time for you to upgrade to Bitcoin XT. And this is supported by all the developers. And at the time, the channels of communication, people being accessible and making their opinions heard, it was very, very different from what you see today. Everyone is vocal. They're on Twitter. Adam is out there. He's got 200,000 so on followers. But back then, like, there was no Bitcoin Twitter.”

    2020-12-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC004: Bitcoin Tech & Future Growth w/ Blockstream's Samson Mow (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “All the above, yeah. Yeah. So it was a very interesting time. And I think it culminated in 2017 or maybe, yeah, I think culminated in 2017, but it started. The genesis was in probably even earlier. So Pete Rizzo and Aaron van Wordem recently released the post about P2SH and that little mini war. I think that was the beginning of the schism where Gavin and Dreesen and other developers started beginning this little conflict. And I think it heated up when Mike Hearn and Gavin tried to push Bitcoin XT as an upgrade. And that was probably mid to late 2015. And the idea behind that, I think, is largely them trying to get rid of the other developers based on disagreements and not seeing eye to eye. And Gavin's often presented as a very good developer, but that I don't believe is actually the case. And that is a source of that friction between him and the other developers.”

    2020-12-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC004: Bitcoin Tech & Future Growth w/ Blockstream's Samson Mow (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “So I guess that episode of Bitcoin's history, it goes by a few names. There's the scaling debate, the fork wars, the Bitcoin Civil War. I mean, which one do you think is a more suitable?”

    2020-12-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC004: Bitcoin Tech & Future Growth w/ Blockstream's Samson Mow (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “But he's written a few blog posts. And one of his blog posts, I believe, is hosted on our blockstream.com site. It's just explaining why he invested in Blockstream early on and what he believes that we can do. But, you know, he still is involved. He sits on our board of directors. He's also on the board of Microsoft and a number of other companies. And I think it'd be cool if he wouldn't have Michael Saylor style and started doing a lot of podcasts talking about Bitcoin and advocating for Blockstream too.”

    2020-12-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC004: Bitcoin Tech & Future Growth w/ Blockstream's Samson Mow (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “All right, so I think the first seed round was 14 million, and then we raised another 50 some odd million, and the total amount of funding right now stands about 91 million. But I think for that time, it was a massive injection in capital in backing Bitcoin development, a time where there was really no support of Bitcoin development. I think MIT was just starting to support some developers like Core Fields and others. Chain code was not stood up yet, but it was a very different era back then. And I think some of our investors are really actually hardcore Bitcoiners, but they don't get a lot of airtime on that front. So Reid Hoffman, he was a large seed investor in Blockstream, and he likes Bitcoin. He's a strong believer in Bitcoin, but he doesn't get out that much to talk and advocate for Bitcoin like, say, Michael Saylor does. But a lot of the companies backing us do have a strong belief in this technology and where it can take us”

    2020-12-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC004: Bitcoin Tech & Future Growth w/ Blockstream's Samson Mow (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “So, Blockstream was officially founded in 2014, but I think the gestation of it happened probably a year or two earlier than that just on the Bitcoin talk forums where Adam and Greg Maxwell, he was the founding CTO. They started talking about things like sidechains and how you could scale Bitcoin using this technology. And the founding team was largely Bitcoin developers. A lot of them have since moved on to join sister or related companies like Chain Code. They do a lot of R&D. The basis of Blockstream is really to advance sidechain technologies and to scale Bitcoin. And I would say our company focus is very much privacy-centric. Like we want to enhance privacy for everybody and make Bitcoin more robust. So you can also say we try to augment Bitcoin. So a lot of the projects that we undertake, you've listed it in your agenda, like satellites, wallets, Explorers, all these things help to make Bitcoin more anti-fragile.”

    2020-12-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC004: Bitcoin Tech & Future Growth w/ Blockstream's Samson Mow (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “Thanks for having me, Preston. But one disclaimer I'm also not an engineer. I'm a game developer and I've done web development, but I'm more of a product person wearing product and business hats.”

    2020-12-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC004: Bitcoin Tech & Future Growth w/ Blockstream's Samson Mow (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT