At the Deconomy Conference[1] in Seoul, South Korea, Blockstream’s Samson Mow, and Bitcoin.com’s Roger Ver engaged in a heated debate. Ostensibly it was about bitcoin scaling but quickly morphed into an argument on the merits of Bitcoin Cash and the Lightning Network.
In all, the debate[2] was an ample showcase of the scaling philosophies of the two communities. Though both participants stressed that the views expressed were their own and not of their companies’ or any larger group.
Ver feels that scaling bitcoin must be done quickly, to keep the momentum going with crypto adoption. He also feels that with advances in hardware, blockchain bloat isn’t a real concern, regardless of block size. He also fears that the lightning network and sidechains will cause their own sort of centralization.
“Samson [Mow] personally and a lot of his friends, they say we need to build everything on top of layer two and will strangle layer one to do it. They don’t quite use that word, but we’ve seen exactly what the effect [has been] even if they had good intentions. The effect was that Bitcoin lost its first mover advantage. The market cap of altcoins has skyrocketed, the number of transactions happening on the Bitcoin core network today is about half of what it was in December of last year. Bitcoin core is having negative merchant adoption around the world [while] Bitcoin Cash is having positive merchant adoption around the world.”
Mow, on the other hand, feels that having a low barrier to entry for people running full nodes is important to Bitcoin’s decentralization. He feels that blockchain bloat could cause centralization and that a more cautious approach is warranted. In addition, he feels that larger blocks
