Samson Mow, BTCC COO, will host an AMA on 8btc forum about Bitcoin scaling and SegWit. Questions raised between 29th Nov to 2nd Dec will be addressed by Samson in person.



8btc forum is the biggest Bitcoin and blockchain community in China where thousands of community members exchanging ideas every day.

As per the AMA thread, a concise history of Bitcoin scaling was introduced to the Chinese community. Then the need of scaling was addressed:

However, the impeccable security system of Bitcoin is not perfect. Blocksize is limited within 1MB with 7 transactions per second as its maximum processing capability. The growing demand from user base renders blocksize scaling a pressing and controversial topic in the Bitcoin community.

At the beginning, the scaling plan was to hardfork the blockchain to allow 20MB blocks. However the community gradually realized that the bigger block was, the more chance it could be orphaned. Also the community will split without full consensus.

Then the background of SegWit is elaborated:

Segregated Witness was first proposed by Pieter Wuille ,Bitcoin Core and Blockstream developer, in the HongKong Scaling Conference December 2015. It’s a better solution that meets the scaling demand and more appropriate to prevent the community from falling apart.

Segwit was merged into Bitcoin Core 0.13.1 version on 28th Oct, 2016, almost a year later from its first proposal.

The activation of SegWit will be in compliance with BIP9 requirement, which means 95% of SegWit support must be publicly seen in the last 2016 blocks.

As one of the biggest Bitcoin mining pool in the world, BTCC pool has announced SegWit support on 18th November,2016.

The AMA thread soon became very crowded and a number of sharp questions raised. Below are some of them:

BW pools asked very good questions there( reddit):

• Has BTCC pool done extensive test on 0.13.1 SegWit code? Can you release test report?

• Does BTCC pool support SW as pool(miner) or as exchange?

• Does BTCC pool have understanding and support from miners in your pool? Have BTCC pool explained pros and cons of various options? Any relevant information can be shared to other pools for reference?

• Does BTCC pool have any mitigation plan for possible bugs of SW recently discussed in Reddit?

• Does BTCC pool still follow 2015 Beijing Pool Confeerence Declaration and 2016 Hong Kong Consensus?

wojiaoxiaohei[vice captain]

I had difficulty understanding the arguments like why we need scaling and what SegWit is. Will these measures push Bitcoin to 10,000 RMB?

tan90d [intern moderator]

I have two questions:

1. Under what circumstances, will BTCC pool stop running segwit-supported Bitcoin client in productive environment?

2. What are the requirements for BTCC pool to run onchain scaling bitcoin client in production?

Bitcoiners[sailor]

As Changyong(a famous Bitcoin fans and scholar in the Chinese community ) put:

Scaling must be implemented ASAP. The global crisis: the plunging Chinese economy, RMB deprecation, EU falling apart and Trump election are accelerators to the meltdown of global financial system based on fiats. We can expect large demands for Bitcoin if it is not for the Bitcoin scaling issue. We could have seen the rise and rise of Bitcoin price. However the network congestion will provide altcoins with more space to grow. Investors, enterprises, developers and coin hoarders may switch to altcoin. What’s your response?

You may find more of Samson’s view from previous reports below:

Samson Mow on scaling (1) and (2): what we need is coding

Samson mow: BTCC will not use bitcoinxt

Here is why BTCC support SegWitc