Liquid Bitcoin with Adam Back & Samson Mow

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“What could you do with Bitcoin if you could do anything? The answer is really Liquid.”
— Samson Mow

SHOW DESCRIPTION

Location: Zoom
Date: Friday 15th May
Project: Blockstream
Role: CEO & Chief Strategy Officer

Bitcoin: decentralised, permissionless, censorship-resistant and unconfiscatable. Unique properties which make it a unique form of money

For Bitcoin to keep growing, these features mustn't be compromised. However, scaling solutions for Bitcoin, may trade off some of these features for other benefits.

With the vast majority of the community in agreement that block sizes must remain small to maximise decentralisation, Bitcoin is best scaled using layered solutions. The Liquid Network, like the Lightning Network, is a layer two solution that, by sacrificing some aspects of decentralisation and censorship resistance, can improve speed and scalability. 

Liquid is a project spearheaded by Blockstream and is aimed at traders, exchanges and market makers to offer faster and more confidential transactions than the Bitcoin basechain. It also adds the ability to build tokens on the network.

In this interview, I talk to Adam Back and Samson Mow Blockstream's CEO & Chief Strategy Officer. We discuss The Liquid Network, the tradeoffs between Liquid and the basechain, how it differs from Lightning network and tokenised securities.

TIMESTAMPS

00:04:10: Introductions
00:04:37: What is Liquid?
00:06:47: Difference between Liquid and Lightning
00:10:57: Liquid blockchain properties
00:16:45: Benefits of Liquid
00:23:14: Liquid elevator pitch
00:25:23: Difference to Ethereum
00:30:01: Can Liquid be traded?
00:35:36: Potential use cases of Liquid
00:41:38: Does Liquid take fees away from miners?
00:44:42: Are Liquid transactions just IOUs?
00:48:22: Token issuances on Liquid
00:49:47: Benefit of Liquid for stable coins
00:54:27: Gaming and trading use cases
00:58:59: Fundraising and security tokens
01:02:30: Chain forks
01:03:47: Confidentiality on Liquid and PayJoin
01:10:49: Liquid Lightning integration
01:14:20: Final comments

 

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SHOW NOTES

PodcastPeter McCormack