Seeing as Mike cared enough to have his obituaries penned up by the New York Time it's only right to include a posthumous mention in this very thread.
With no further ado here is the very best rendition of today's events with commentary from Qntra.
The focus of Popper's piece is on the Blocksize distraction Hearn was involved in. Little was made by Popper of Hearn's previous Bitcoin software development. Let's go over a shorter but more comprehensive history of Mike's "contributions":
BitcoinJ, a software library in Java created for and still featured in some Bitcoin SPV clients.
Contributions to "Bitcoin" v0.82 where two changes pushed by Hearn were introduced:
Blockchain handling databased changed to LevelDB, leading to the Fork of March 2013.
Bloom Filters, which lead to several means to remotely crash bitcoin nodes serving them, and presented a perennial annoyance to nodes not serving them until recently.
Clients descended from the v0.8 series will likely have to keep addressing bugs introduced by Hearn's changes for years.
Numerous network changes introducing new commands for nodes in order to better serve SPV clients while greatly increasing the resources necessary to keep a Bitcoin node online. When these proposed changes were soundly rejected he made the first BitcoinXT patch set.
He in concert with Gavin Andressen released an XT client for the Bitcoin network which under certain circumstances would fork off into an altcoin, opening the only chapter of Mike Hearn's Bitcoin involvement Popper cared to mention in anything resembling detail.
The entire corpus of Mike Hearn's body of work directed at Bitcoin aimed to transform Bitcoin from itself into something else readily centralized and controlled by the extant fiat order. Mike Hearn's work was dominated by measures which ever so slightly increase the ease3 of using SPV clients at substantial expense to the operators of the Bitcoin full nodes making the network possible. He even openly advocated a future for Bitcoin where nodes had to exist on Google's scale and in a number that could be counted with the fingers of one hand.
Mike Hearn was not the first and will definitely not be the last agent of sabotage directed towards Bitcoin projects. In Mike's place other agents continue the work he started, with their every new attempt against Bitcoin more desperate than their last.
For reference here is the market's reaction to Gavin Andresen & Mike Hearn's one two punch. Always good for squeezing freeloading weak hands.
Don't forget to buy the dip and have a thought for Mike! Another one bites the dust but don't expect honeybadger to care.
