By
Bhushan Akolkar
April 19th, 2024
In his post Hearn announces his leaving the bitcoin industry and explains why.
Bitcoin seems to undergo considerably price crash. Bitcoin price has fallen below a 400$ level today and continues fluctuating. As for 2 p.m. it makes up 369.80 while at 8 a.m. in the morning the price was 361.00. This is how bitcoin market immediately reacted to an article published by Mike Hearn, a bitcoin developer who predicted failure to the cryptocurrency.
Remarkably, the bitcoin price drop was caused by Hearn who is one of the earliest Bitcoin developers. He has been involved in the sphere of bitcoin for more than 5 years and even inspired several entrepreneurs to create startups. It took him some time to come to the conclusion that bitcoin is not a profitable sphere anymore.
“Bitcoin is an experiment and like all experiments, it can fail. But even knowing it, the inescapable failure that has already happened still saddens me greatly”, says Hearn.
The article bears the name “The resolution of the bitcoin experiment” and contains explanation of bitcoin’s shaky position. Hearn states that blockchain is overloaded but many experts consider his characteristic of the network as “being on the brink of technical collapse” to be an overstatement. And this is exactly the sort of thing that can cause panic among those that don’t have all the information.
The topic of blockchain size increase is raised from time to time in the bitcoin community. Last August an open letter was published and signed by leading bitcoin entrepreneurs. The authors offered to add 8MB blocks to blockchain by December 2015 through a protocol called Bitcoin XT.
It was developed by Hearn and Gavin Andresen, chief scientist at the Bitcoin Foundation. The letter said: “Our community stands at a crossroads. After lengthy conversations with core developers, miners, our own technical teams, and other industry participants, we believe it is imperative that we plan for success by raising the maximum block size.”
However Bitcoin XT didn’t find overall support. Objections came from most bitcoin wallet services and Chinese bitcoin miners — those who contribute 50 percent of the processing power required to maintain bitcoin’s network. They referred to the fears surrounding the country’s limited bandwidth. Both Hearn and Andresen stood by their idea saying that those in opposition were doing so for personal gain.
Now Hearn has made a firm decision to leave the bitcoin industry. He said in conclusion: “There are many talented and energetic people working in the Bitcoin space, and in the past five years I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know many of them. Their entrepreneurial spirit and alternative perspectives on money, economics and politics were fascinating to experience, and despite how it’s all gone down I don’t regret my time with the project. I woke up this morning to find people wishing me well in the uncensored forum and asking me to stay, but I’m afraid I’ve moved on to other things. To those people I say: good luck, stay strong, and I wish you the best.”