Samson Mow Accused of “Treacherous Betrayal” by Bitcoin Miner

Spring has been intense in the bitcoin world as Blockstream and proponents of on-chain scaling go head to head in what appears to be a culmination of a two years long debate.

The latest twist is extension blocks, a proposal by some Lightning Network developers, BitPay, Purse and others, which aims to increase on-chain capacity while also allowing for layer two protocols such as the Lightning Network.

The proposal seems to have some chance of gaining consensus, but Blockstream has been strongly against it for no clear reason. Raising speculations that the relatively new company which lacks any significant product aims to keep capacity at 1MB.

Tensions rose further today after Gang Wu, HaoBTC’s founder and an influential bitcoiner in the Chinese community, accused Samson Mow, a former BTCC employee and strong Blockstream supporter, of “treacherously betraying his friends,” according to a translation trustnodes has obtained.

The very heated and blunt exchange concerns a tweet by Mow where he said: “Exciting to hear @bcoinio w/ $300k Bitmain investment has a Schnorr + Extension Blocks proposal via secret miner activated soft-fork. #drama.”

Bcoin is a full node bitcoin implementation sponsored by Purse, a bitcoin wallet, one of the proposers of extension block. Following Mow’s tweet, they say they rushed to publicize the proposal:

“Samson tweeted saying we had received $300k from Bitmain. It’s a blatant lie. We have not received a dime from Bitmain. Samson was a friend, and he could have easily asked me. Worried that this would paint the idea biased, we rushed out the announcement, specification, and code.”

It is this statement Gang Wu used to accuse Mow of “treachery” and “betrayal of friends.” In reply, Mow said they were not friends, just people he knows. Gang Wu, according to a translation obtained by trustnodes, then said:

“So, Chinese miners offered money and they become evil? BTCC’s money mostly come from the mining pool and your salary is from miner’s money. So that means you are very evil as you were at BTCC?”

Gang Wu then said Mow left BTCC at its most difficult time and when he was most needed as unexpectedly PBoC had opened an investigation. Mow said his departure was planned beforehand, but Gang Wu said the big three Chinese bitcoin exchanges were under immense stress and he knew employees at OKCoin who were to leave but stayed to help the company after the investigation opened. Then, Gang Wu said:

“The big three, people are taking big pressure, people are going through hardships. The industry is also slowly recovering, but we just discuss matters as they are. Don’t use conspiracy theories to attack others. Otherwise, its harmful for the whole industry.

Every day you use conspiracy, so toxic, is getting outsiders to laugh at us. If you keep doing this, the future of bitcoin will be destroyed, leaving nothing but garbage.”

Gang Wu is sort of China’s version of Antonopoulos. A significant figure in the Chinese bitcoin community who advocated for the currency in the early days. He had considerable influence during the height of the debate in 2016 and some credit the man for spelling the doom of Bitcoin Classic.

His heated statements may indicate Blockstream is quickly running out of friends and their supporters appear to be getting some heat from the wider bitcoin community. However, it remains to be seen whether bitcoin businesses will rise in unison to isolate Blockstream and end this two years long debate by collectively strongly supporting one proposal and so increasing capacity.