By
Bhushan Akolkar
October 25th, 2023
Hearn comments on the negative feedback he has got on his article.
Mike Hearn, a former bitcoin entrepreneur, was rather disappointed by the feedback he has got on his article “The resolution of the bitcoin experiment”. Hearn admits that his desire to put things in his own words, to simply express his point of view was misunderstood by many. He finds it is necessary to underline that he hadn’t been asked to write, or paid to, nor could he financially benefit from doing so in any way.
The misunderstanding could occur due to the fact that Mike took a job with a startup that works with blockchain and strives to apply it in the existing financial system (R3 CEV). But R3 isn’t a bitcoin company. Moreover Hearn had never made a secret out of his appointment. He had even mentioned it in the New York Times article. Todd McDonald, co-founder of R3, talks about this situation in the official blog:
“The resulting kerfuffle has led to a few quite detailed (and somewhat enjoyable) conspiracy theories on The Internets, mainly saying that R3 instructed Mike as part of some coordinated ‘attack’ on Bitcoin. If only we had such control over a brilliant mind like Mike. He is a programmer after all …
… How can the whole thing not make you tired, no matter what ‘side’ you are on? And as I have mentioned before, this concept of one side or one approach ‘winning’ over another, or that there even is a contest, baffles me. Success for R3 (or any of the handful of companies in this space) does not need to come at the expense of Bitcoin. It is more likely that traction for either camp would be a massive positive for the other. Put simply: I personally own (a small amount) of bitcoin AND also think that it holds little merit for large, regulated financial institutions as it is currently constructed. In the words of William Goldman, “nobody knows anything” but it doesn’t stop us all from giving it a go.”
As a reminder, Hearn decided to leave industry insisting that bitcoin has failed. He wrote: “It has failed because the community has failed. What was meant to be a new, decentralised form of money that lacked “systemically important institutions” and “too big to fail” has become something even worse: a system completely controlled by just a handful of people. Worse still, the network is on the brink of technical collapse. The mechanisms that should have prevented this outcome have broken down, and as a result there’s no longer much reason to think Bitcoin can actually be better than the existing financial system.”
Such resolution of the man who has made a considerable contribution to bitcoin development couldn’t but cause a stir in the community. Bitcoin price fell below $400 and now makes up 385.39$. In response to Hearn’s statement that blockchain is full, the largest mining pools and transaction processors in the industry announced their support for 2 megabyte block size increase with Bitcoin Classic.
Bitcoin community believes that implementing a soft fork and increasing the block size to 2 megabyte can be a better way out of the situation comparing to forceful implementing of a hard fork and as a result creating a potentially dangerous environment for the Bitcoin network.
