As Mike Hearn gave up on Bitcoin, is Bitcoin dead/will die as he said ?

[Fakhoury]

Hello,

As you can read from this URL (https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experiment-dabb30201f7#.mu7gne8ca), Mike Hearn: "I will no longer be taking part in Bitcoin development and have sold all my coins".

Is really Bitcoin dead/will die as he said ?

Is Bitcoin's future dependable on him ?

Thanks.

[chopstick]

Mike Hearn is just being overdramatic. Of course life will go on with or without him.

[Fakhoury]

Mike Hearn is just being overdramatic. Of course life will go on with or without him.

I have the same feeling since what you said, had been told numerous times.

[matt4054]

[stoat]

What the fuck mike hearn.   Bitcoin is better off without all these so called "businesspeople" involved.  Carpetbaggers and scammers every last one of them.  Look at what has happened to the bitcoin price since it became "big business". All this talk of VC money ETFs and bank adoption is just farts in the breeze, meanwhile we have big businesses creaming value out of the system and then converting btc to fiat at the expense of hodlers and true believers and giving absolutely nothing back to the system.  

Am I not correct that the btc price has been just falling ever since certain online retailers and payment processors started operating?

Bitcoin is better off without these middleman assholes so called "payment processors". It was designed to cut these people out.

[Alley]

Who is this Mike Hearn?

Some guy who is butthurt about leaving a cushy google job to create bitcoin XT.

[BTCtrader71]

Hello,

As you can read from this URL (https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experiment-dabb30201f7#.mu7gne8ca), Mike Hearn: "I will no longer be taking part in Bitcoin development and have sold all my coins".

Is really Bitcoin dead/will die as he said ?

Is Bitcoin's future dependable on him ?

Thanks.

I read his medium article and I find many of his points persuasive. But let's assume for the sake of argument that his worst fears as laid out in the article pan out in the coming months. That would make bitcoin becomes useless from a practical perspective for microtransactions and for any transaction taking less than hours (e.g. you could no longer use it at coffee shops). I guess he's saying that Maxwell and Peter Todd etc want exactly that to happen. But it seems to me that if those things actually happened, then at some point the wider community would wake up to Hearn's point of view and the appropriate fixes would be put into place. And bitcoin would live on.

It seems to me that the biggest threat is not block size or even scalability, but governance and conflict resolution when the core devs have a falling out like they are having now. The worst case scenario is multiple forks, and whichever fork has the most mining power wins. Hearn says that method will fail because the mining power is concentrated in China and so far, they are too short sighted to fall in line behind the necessary fixes.

Even if we assume that everything that Mike says is right, including the fear that the Chinese miners will be slow to get in line behind the most appropriate changes, there is no reason that they would not eventually fall in line behind the necessary changes. Even if a little bit of shit needs to hit the fan first.

Therefore, his doomsday argument is premature.

Comments?

(Aside: I do not consider myself an expert in the whole block size debate.)

[Alley]

I guess bit coin will survive but it is really really bad news regardless. We could be looking at a 50% drop in value.

Why is that?  I take it you're a big hearn fan?  That explains alot actually.

[muyuu]

Mike Hearn has consistently been attacking Bitcoin for at least 2 years. Good fucking riddance.

[snortex]

Is really Bitcoin dead/will die as he said ?

Hi did not say this, he said it failed which is different. You can recover from a failure, but cannot recover from death.
He may be too pessimistic, but many of his points are valid.
The article is very interesting and definitely worth reading.

Is Bitcoin's future dependable on him ?

Of course not.
He developed tons of code for bitcoin, but there are other developers too.
There is actually no any single person bitcoin future dependable on.

[bitcon]

bitcoin failed?   still working fine here.   Did Hearn at least say which "superior"  altcoin he is switching to?

[Gyrsur]

Did Hearn at least say which "superior"  altcoin he is switching to?

R3coin

[matt4054]

Hi did not say this, he said it failed which is different. You can recover from a failure, but cannot recover from death.
He may be too pessimistic, but many of his points are valid.
The article is very interesting and definitely worth reading.

I totally agree with this.

But I also totally agree with this:

Mike Hearn is just being overdramatic. Of course life will go on with or without him.

He is definitely overdramatic IMO too. I was much into network engineering in the mid 2000s and we kept on hearing many head figures lamenting over poor IPv6 adoption and the inevitable chaos that IPv4 exhaustion would bring. To some extent, I shared their opinion too, and I could throw up whenever I found myself envisioning a world of carrier-grade NAT everywhere. It would break the internet! The internet would no longer be P2P capable, big boo-hoos and all. Sure.

More than ten years later, recent developments over the last months show that IPv6 is finally gaining traction years after total IPv4 address space exhaustion occurred, and that in the mean time, the internet is still alive and well.

About the 1MB block size limit, I think the Bitcoin network can survive as is for quite a long time before a sane, worthy consensus can finally be reached. If economics and market rules give a clear enough incentive for the block size limit to increase, reality will follow suit.

[spiderbrain]

He's being overly dark, but the core dev team really are off in a world of their own, I've worked open source communities for a long time, and the bitcoin dev community really doesn't work well at all compared to most others. I suppose I should get more involved on the tech discussions, but I've never bothered before as it always just seemed to work. Not any more, it seems.

[matt4054]

Yes, and I think the same goes for many devs around here who have been involved in other OSS projects.

IMHO the polite way to leave a project in OSS is to say fork off. He said fuck off and that's too bad. OTOH his rant may trigger some kind of reaction among other core devs to address the issues and find more sensible ways to reach wider community consensus.

[suda123]

He's being overly dark, but the core dev team really are off in a world of their own, I've worked open source communities for a long time, and the bitcoin dev community really doesn't work well at all compared to most others. I suppose I should get more involved on the tech discussions, but I've never bothered before as it always just seemed to work. Not any more, it seems.

lol that profile picture, but yea bear trap

[bogartz]

bitcoin will not be dead just because of a single person leaving it.

[iCEBREAKER]

Mike Hearn has consistently been attacking Bitcoin for at least 2 years. Good fucking riddance.

Mikey is one of our most productive lolcows.  I will miss kicking him around and goading him into intemperate, self-indulgent tantrums.  

[AliceWonderMiscreations]

It seems like sour grapes, and I wouldn't be surprised if he has a plan to get involved with an altcoin that he will then herald as the crypto doing it right.

With respect to BitcoinXT - there's a reason I chose not to switch to it.

The reason I chose not to switch to it is because I don't believe the network is at a point where doing so is critically necessary, so switching to it now would be premature.

It might be the right solution, I have no position on that whatsover. But even if it is the right solution, now is not the time. The prudent thing to do is make sure proper research is done on all the available options and I don't believe that had finished when XT was released, so switching to it would have been premature.

I guess he doesn't like that though and wanted us all to jump on it as the next best thing before the problem was properly researched, which I believe we still have some time to do.

[ask]

Just think:

- where was Google 5 years ago when Mike left it, and where is Google now?
- where will Bitcoin be in 5 years...

Bye, bye Mike. We will NOT miss you.