Samson Mow, the COO of BTCC, has positioned himself as a vocal opponent of Bitcoin Classic. During a recent appearance on The Bitcoin Game with host Rob Mitchell, Mow discussed his company's backing o
Samson Mow, the COO of BTCC, has positioned himself as a vocal opponent of Bitcoin Classic. During a recent appearance on The Bitcoin Game with host Rob Mitchell, Mow discussed his company's backing of Bitcoin Core's development efforts. BTCC's stance goes beyond mere preference. Mow and CEO Bobby Lee attended a Hong Kong meeting that helped derail a planned hard fork that would have increased the block size limit to 2 MB, encouraging miners to stick with Bitcoin Core rather than switch to Bitcoin Classic.
On the podcast, Mow outlined why BTCC supports the Bitcoin Core team. "They have been making good decisions to make sure Bitcoin is functioning. They've been patching bugs and handling security issues, and I don't see a reason why we wouldn't support them . . . It's a real no-brainer of who you want to support."
A popular narrative on the Bitcoin subreddit r/btc holds that Blockstream, a blockchain software company, has taken over the Bitcoin Core project. Mow rejected this framing. "The Core team is a very big team; it's not Blockstream. It's a lot of companies and a lot of individuals."
He acknowledged that Gavin Andresen, the earlier lead of Bitcoin development, deserves credit for shepherding the project through its early years. But Andresen moved on. "These other people — the people who are actually building and extending the system today — they know what they're doing. They have a good understanding of the system, and you could almost say that they may know better because they've written a lot of the new code in Bitcoin."
Andresen retains commit access to the Bitcoin Core repository on Github and can still contribute. The structure of the project changed when Wladimir J. van der Laan took the role of lead maintainer. Under Andresen and Satoshi Nakamoto before him, the lead maintainer made unilateral decisions on contested issues. Van der Laan shifted the project toward consensus-building.
Mow pushed back during his interview against the idea that Core functions like a corporation. The people who work on it answer to no central authority. "A lot of people have this perception that the Core team is almost like a company and they have to respond to their customers. A lot of these terms and phrases actually come from the Classic team, but the fact is the Core team is just a loose collection of individuals and companies that support individuals that work together." Core operates without marketing or customer service departments. "There are no customers. There are people who use the software that they build, which is free."
Mow's thinking on Bitcoin Core has shifted over time. He once struggled to understand why Core developers communicated so little with the public. A three-hour conversation with Adam Back, president of Blockstream, changed his perspective. Core developers stepped up their outreach during the past year, a change Mow attributes to the upheaval caused by Bitcoin XT and Bitcoin Classic. For now, Mow thinks the community should let the developers work. "I think what we need to do is give the Core team time to write the code . . . These debates and the drama takes time away from them, and it slows the developers down."
