If you follow the crypto world like I do, it seems almost a little bit ridiculous sometimes with all of these personalities threatening each other and massively volatile digital asset prices.
My friend Teeka Tiwari calls these conflicts the “nerd wars” and thinks we should ignore the noise. I tend to agree in the larger scheme of things. However, I do think that this kind of chatter hurts the evolution of this asset class.
In times like these it is important to understand that underlying all of this stuff is a world-changing technology—blockchain—and it was all started by one white paper authored by Satoshi Nakamoto.
That white paper gave us one of the most elegant ideas of the century. It’s called bitcoin. Over time, it is my opinion that we will see bitcoin evolve into something of tremendous significance.
However, we aren’t their yet and part of the issue is that we are still in the early stages trying to understand how we can unleash all of its potentials.
As a payment system, it has run up against some challenges with regard to scaling. How do you keep this elegant system intact while making it something that can be used for everyday transactions?
This question ultimately led to a major schism in the bitcoin community in August of 2017 which led to the split between bitcoin and bitcoin cash.
I have been trying to get someone to intelligently speak about the issues surrounding the scaling of bitcoin and I was fortunate to find one of the brightest minds in the field, Samson Mow from Blockstream. Listen now to hear how he thinks bitcoin should be scaled.
Samson Mow
is Blockstream's CSO and Pixelmatic's CEO. Blockstream is the leading provider of blockchain technologies, on the forefront of work in cryptography and distributed systems. Samson founded Pixelmatic in 2011 to creating engaging games that are truly social and encourage new connections to be made.
Previously at BTCC, one of the largest bitcoin exchanges and mining pools in the world, Samson's role as COO was to oversee the day-to-day operations of the company and directly manage the exchange and mining pool business units. Previously, Samson was a director of production and executive producer at Ubisoft, where he spearheaded expansion into Asian markets for web, social, and mobile games. Samson oversaw ongoing development and live operations of the cross-platform (web and iOS) MMO strategy game "Might & Magic: Heroes Kingdoms" in Asia, along with the social games "Castle & Co" (Facebook, mixi, Naver) and "The Smurfs & Co" (Facebook, mixi). "The Smurfs & Co" is Ubisoft’s most successful social game to date, reaching over 10 million users through organic growth. Prior to Ubisoft, Samson was in charge of business development and operations at Sitemasher, a Vancouver based startup developing a SaaS platform for building websites and apps. Sitemasher was the winner of the 2008 Blue Sky Innovation Excellence Award from Microsoft and was later acquired by Salesforce.com for US$20 million and rebranded as Site.com.
Samson holds a Bachelor of Business Administration degree from Simon Fraser University in Canada. As a veteran of the game industry, Samson regularly features as a speaker and panelist in conferences such as GDC and CGDC.
Shownotes:
Samson Mow’s background
“Bitcoin is like a tank, or an aircraft carrier”
Lightning Network
What does Blockstream do?
Liquid Network
Bitcoin, not blockchain
Blockstream.com