Bitcoin advocate Samson Mow says Ethereum should undergo a hard fork after North Korean hackers stole a staggering $1.4 billion in ETH and stETH by exploiting crypto exchange Bybit. In a new thread on the social media platform X, Bitcoin (BTC) maximalist Samson Mow says the leading smart contract platform by volume should roll back […]
The post Crypto Veteran Samson Mow Slams Ethereum, Calls for Chain Rollback After Hackers Loot $1,400,000,000 From Bybit appeared first on The Daily Hodl.
While Bitcoin analyst Willy Woo advises caution over the coming months, other crypto analysts are optimistic that Bitcoin has a “high probability of reversal.”
A Bitcoin analyst has warned crypto market participants to tread carefully in the coming months, with more profit-taking expected in the near term.
“Risk is peaking for the first time in this cycle, and there’s a ton of profit in coins that have been selling and plenty more profit-taking to go before we are properly reset,” Bitcoin (BTC) analyst Willy Woo said in a Jan. 10 X post.
He said that although Bitcoin sentiment “seems uber bullish,” market participants should opt for a more “cautious approach” in the coming months. He highlighted his Bitcoin local risk model, which indicates risk levels not seen since January 2023.
Samson Mow, CEO of JAN3, has doubled down on his earlier prediction of bitcoin reaching $1 million in weeks to months. Mow states that the U.S. debt cannot be repaid, and one of the best decisions to deal with it is rebasing the price of the U.S. dollar to bitcoin. JAN3 CEO Samson Mow: The […]
JAN3 CEO Samson Mow suggested that traditional financial institutions operate in the shadows to prevent more nations from following El Salvador’s path of integrating Bitcoin into their financial systems. Mow commented on a specific case involving the World Bank and another nation. JAN3 CEO Samson Mow: ‘Covert Operations’ Are Undermining Countries’ Will of Adopting Bitcoin […]
Samson Mow, CEO of JAN3, recently doubled down on his earlier prediction about bitcoin reaching $1 million this year. In an interview, Mow stated that the market was wrong, and that bitcoin was “massively undervalued” at current prices. “There is so little bitcoin out there you can’t even double your holdings as a large entity […]
Jan3 CEO Samson Mow reiterated that fear-driven markets “never lasts long” because fundamentals usually “win out over time.”
Bitcoin traders predicting the asset’s price returning to the $40,000 level might be driven more by fear than by any technical fundamentals, according to Bitcoin technology firm Jan3 CEO Samson Mow.
“Bears saying Bitcoin will drop to $0.04M have no basis for that prediction other than self induced fear,” Mow wrote in an Sept. 6 X post.
Despite Bitcoin’s (BTC) recent seven-day period trading below $60,000, Mow believes Bitcoin could just as easily hit six figures, citing macroeconomic factors like the significant amount of interest the United States government pays on its debts daily, and the growing number of businesses holding the asset.
Troubled exchanges like Binance and Coinbase might not be the biggest trading venues for Bitcoin, Samson Mow hinted.
Amid the panic over lawsuits against major cryptocurrency exchanges, one Bitcoin (BTC) advocate argued that the BTC market is much bigger than the one tracked by exchanges.
The total Bitcoin market is not limited to Binance, Coinbase or any other crypto exchange, Jan3 CEO Samson Mow told Cointelegraph at the BTC Prague conference on June 9.
“Whereas I think for Bitcoin, it's much harder to quantify how much of the market it is. It's because a lot of Bitcoin trades are block trades,” Mow said.
In mentioning Bitcoin block trades, Mow referred to private trading channels which allow investors to privately negotiate and proceed with large BTC buy or sell orders. Some of such channels include peer-to-peer (P2P) or over-the-counter (OTC) deals, he noted, adding:
“You kind of have this black box around Bitcoin. You don't really know how much the market is total. If Bitcoin functions as P2P, you're not going to quantifiably measure how much Bitcoin is traded.”
Indeed, private Bitcoin trading channels like P2P or OTC are not included in total BTC trading volumes on major crypto tracking websites like CoinGecko. That means that Bitcoin’s daily trading volume is actually bigger than $9.6 billion recorded at the time of writing.
“CoinGecko only tracks trades happening on crypto exchanges and does not track trades happening on P2P platforms and brokerages,” CoinGecko co-founder and chief operating officer Bobby Ong told Cointelegraph.
“P2P platforms include places such as Binance P2P, Huobi P2P, Paxful, Remitano and so on,” the executive noted. CoinGecko has no plans to track such platforms in the near future, Ong noted.
Related: Binance.US halts trading for dozens of USDT, BTC, BUSD pairs amid SEC lawsuit
Apart from P2P, CoinGecko also doesn’t record institutional trades on OTC, Ong said, adding:
“Institutional trades that happen on exchanges that we track are recorded. OTC trades are not recorded as it's like a P2P trade but between large entities.”
The new remarks from Jan3 CEO may imply that cryptocurrency exchange moguls like Binance or Coinbase might not dominate the Bitcoin market as much as some might think.
In January 2023, the Norwegian crypto research firm K33 Research — formerly known as Arcane Research — said that Binance handled 92% of the Bitcoin spot market in 2022. “No matter how you look at it in terms of trading activity, Binance is the crypto market,” the firm wrote at the time.
Magazine: Bitcoin is on a collision course with ‘Net Zero’ promises
Bitcoin cannot be destroyed by the fall of cryptocurrency giants like FTX or, hypothetically, other big exchanges, according to Samson Mow.
The collapse of FTX has triggered a notable drop in the price of Bitcoin (BTC), but that in no case means that BTC can be destroyed by failing cryptocurrency firms, according to Bitcoin proponent Samson Mow.
The cryptocurrency industry is still seeing the wave of FTX contagion playing out, and it is likely to face more similar crashes in the near future, Mow said in an interview with Cointelegraph.
According to the executive, FTX contagion could be part of the Terra ecosystem collapse, which caused a domino effect on the industry, including major crypto lenders like Celsius and Voyager.
“More things like this will continue to happen in the crypto space because all of these projects are worthless houses of cards,” Mow predicted. He added that FTX’s failure was “easy to see coming” due to FTX’s relationship with Alameda.
“A general rule of thumb is if a company prints a token out of thin air and either sells it to retail, or relies on it as an asset, you should expect them to collapse eventually,” JAN3 CEO stated.
Mow also argued that industry's efforts to prove credibility — including exchanges increasingly releasing proof-of-reserves — don’t mean much unless they prove liabilities. “Any system that can be gamed, will be gamed,” declared, referring to players faking their reserves by shuffling funds between each other just before producing a proof.
“Then you have to factor in the fiat side — which would require an audit, but that may not be useful either as FTX also had an auditor,” he noted.
As FTX contagion continues to spread across the industry, one can expect the worst scenarios for some of the world’s largest crypto firms. Addressing the question of whether Bitcoin would survive a hypothetical event where crypto giants like Tether or Binance collapse, Mow expressed confidence that Bitcoin is designed to defeat any issue, stating:
“Bitcoin will overcome any issue simply due to its design and the irrefutable need for sound money in human civilization. The failure of any giant would only be a temporary setback, just as Mt. Gox’s impact is no longer of relevance.”
Despite likely setting the crypto industry back a few years, FTX collapse has done “wonders” for the Bitcoin industry in terms of growing adoption of self-custody and hardware wallets, Mow emphasized. “Unfortunately, most people cannot learn from the mistakes of others, only from their own suffering,” he added.
Related: FTX will be the last giant to fall this cycle: Hedge fund co-founder
The exec also suggested that Bitcoin newcomers are likely to make the same mistakes in the future despite the industry showing the biggest vulnerabilities of centralized exchanges during Bitcoin’s very first crash back in 2011. He stated:
“Then things will settle down over the next few years, and newcomers in five or six years will make the same mistakes again and lose their funds. Rinse and repeat.”
Former chief strategy officer at Blockstream, Mow is a major Bitcoin advocate and founder of the game development company Pixelmatic. He is also CEO of the Bitcoin technology firm JAN3, which is focused on promoting Bitcoin and accelerating hyperbitcoinization. In April 2022, the firm signed an agreement with the government of El Salvador and president Nayib Bukele to assist the country in developing digital infrastructure and establishing Bitcoin City.
Mow claims a few node operators have the power to change, delay or even cancel the upcoming Ethereum Merge.
Samson Mow, a well-known Bitcoin proponent, recently took to social media to talk about the centralization aspects of the upcoming Merge, which he claimed isn’t widely known.
Ethereum is in the countdown mode after the completion of the Bellatrix upgrade on Sept. 6 and is all set for the official transition between Sept.13-15, depending on the hashrate (computer power) input on the network. The Merge is slated to be triggered by a difficulty threshold called the Terminal Total Difficulty (TTD) at a value of 58750000000000000000000.
Mow claimed that while everyone thinks that the Merge will be triggered by pre-set threshold difficulty, there is one aspect that not many people have paid attention to. He said node operators have the power to overwrite the TTD value by a single line of code.
Mow cited a Galaxy blog post highlighting the key centralization issue with the Merge and claimed that Ethereum has knowingly suppressed this fact.
So how does the MeRgE actually get triggered? I was curious so I did some digging. I thought it may be set with a fixed mechanism or readiness threshold, but no. Someone, probably Vitalik, will just say “go” and then it happens. The complex charade is to mask the centralization. pic.twitter.com/PmxcTMU8J5
— Samson Mow (@Excellion) September 7, 2022
He noted that with few nodes that matter, “so those in charge can simply “feed the actual value” for activation time whenever they feel like it. What’s hilarious is they then make tracker sites to “predict” when it will happen.”
Cointelegraph reached out to Mow to get his perspective on the upcoming Merge and the centralization debate looming around Ethereum’s upcoming transition. Mow told Cointelegraph that with a move to proof-of-stake (PoS), the “centralization aspect of Ethereum would become permanent.”
Related: Vitalik reminds node operators to update client before the Bellatrix upgrade
He added that in a PoS system, node operators are solely responsible for decision making which is clear from the TTD override example. He said:
“If Ethereans really wanted to have something energy efficient, scalable, and cheaper, they would be doing R&D on Bitcoin second layer technologies like Lightning and Liquid.”
Ethereum’s transition to a PoS network started out as a strategy to address its scalability woes but soon became a case for energy efficiency amid growing scrutiny around the Bitcoin network’s energy consumption. The Merge would mark the completion of the second phase of the three-phase transition process, and the majority of key benefits, including cheaper gas fees and faster transaction throughput, will arrive with the completion of the third phase.
In this week's DeFi newsletter we bring you an exclusive research report on Terra, Samson Mow's shocking comment on DeFi and Fireblock's latest DeFi institutional offering.
The week was filled with several new project developments and key updates from leading decentralized applications (DApps) and decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols. Fireblocks has expanded its institutional access to Terra’s DeFi ecosystem and Solana partnered with the Notifi network to improve the abysmal participation rates in governance votes.
We will also look into the Cointelegraph research into the Terra ecosystem’s future and see if it can sustain the current growth. Samson Mow, the former executive at Blockstream, questions the decentralized aspect of the DeFi ecosystem.
Top DeFi tokens saw another week of bearish price action despite several new developments and barring a few, the majority of the tokens in the top-100 registered double-digit losses over the past week.
Fireblocks expands institutional access to Terra’s DeFi ecosystem
Fireblocks, a digital asset custody platform, announced that it has enabled institutional decentralized finance access to Terra, the second-largest DeFi protocol by total value locked (TVL). As per the announcement, Fireblocks users can now securely access all the decentralized applications built on the Terra blockchain.
The launch is in response to Fireblocks’ early access program users, who invested over $250 million into the Terra DeFi ecosystem within the first 72 hours of its integration going live.
‘DeFi is not decentralized at all,’ says former Blockstream executive
Samson Mow, former chief strategy officer at Blockstream and founder of JAN3, is convinced that most decentralized finance protocols can’t compete with Bitcoin (BTC) when it comes to providing an effective monetary network because of their lack of decentralization.
As Mow pointed out, DeFi projects are governed by entities that can modify the protocol at will.
“Bitcoin, at the fundamental level, is money, and it should be immutable,” explained Mow. “If you can change it at will, then you’re no better than a fiat currency governed by the Fed.”
Solana DAOs can now bug you to vote with phone calls and texts
The Notifi Network is banking on this concept to help improve the abysmal participation rates in governance votes. Launching with Solana decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, it combines popular centralized methods used by the Web3 community such as Telegram and Discord pings with more traditional and harder to ignore notifications like phone calls, text messages or emails.
Backed by crypto venture capital firms Race Capital and Hashed, on April 24, Notifi applied its notification service to all DAOs that launched on the Solana Realms DAO platform.
Can Terra blockchain sustain its growth? Research report digs deeper
Cointelegraph Research fundamentally evaluates Terra in its 50-page report to provide an in-depth analysis of its recent updates, including Columbus-5, the Bitcoin acquisition and others.
Decentralized algorithmic stablecoins, blockchain integration in real-world payments and 20% annual percentage yields (APYs) on DeFi protocols — what is all of this, and is it really doing this? The team of experienced cryptoanalysts from the Big Four and the best universities worldwide dives deep into the blockchain’s ecosystem, community and underlying technology, assessing the potential regulatory, market and technological risks.
DeFi market overview
Analytical data reveals that DeFi’s total value locked dipped by one billion dollars, falling to $123.08 billion. Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView reveals that DeFi’s top 100 tokens by market capitalization registered a week filled with volatile price action and constant bearish pressure.
Majority of the DeFi tokens in the top-100 ranking by market cap traded in red, barring a few. Kyber Network Crystal v2 (KNC) was the biggest gainer with a 25% rise over the past week, followed by Kava (KAVA) at 17% and Curve DAO Token (CRV) at 8%.
Thanks for reading our summary of this week’s most impactful DeFi developments. Join us again next Friday for more stories, insights and education in this dynamically advancing space.
