It is indeed a sad day for the Bitcoin community as one of its core developers Mike Hearn decided to call it quits. Mike Hearn, a former Google engineer who turned into Bitcoin Core developer and later on joined Gavin Andresen to create Bitcoin XT believes that Bitcoin is dead!
In his latest blog post, Mike Hearn has written about his experience with Bitcoin development and how like many experiments, Bitcoin has also failed (at least according to him). In what sounds like a sad end to the most aspiring story, Mike has declared that he will be ending his association with the groundbreaking digital currency and that he has sold all the bitcoin he owned.
According to Mike Hearn, current improvement in bitcoin prices in just a temporary spell and on the long run it will start exhibiting a downward trend. He further supports his prophecy of Bitcoin’s downfall by saying that the community has failed the digital currency by compromising the very principles behind it. The currency is no longer decentralized and democratized as it was intended and the whole Bitcoin network in now controlled by just a handful of people.
Mike Hearn backs it up with loads of data including graphs and charts depicting the falling rate of transaction processing capability of the network due to limited block size. The block size is currently capped at 1 MB and repeated attempts to increase it has been met with stiff opposition by those with self-serving interests. These events have resulted in the fall of bitcoin transaction processing rate of the network, effectively creating backlogs of transactions which will continue to grow unless immediate action is taken. It has also led to a rise in transaction costs (aka miner fee) which now stands close to any regular credit card transaction.
Mike Hearn also accuses many prominent people in Bitcoin community for their role in this tragedy. According to him, moderators of the Bitcoin subreddit have been instrumental in alienating the important contributors to the community in order to control the flow of information and for voicing their opinion which goes against their popular belief.Even the supposed Bitcoin resource site – Bitcoin.org’s moderator is said to be instrumental in killing the Bitcoin XT aka BIP-101 by preventing any dialogues from happening on the platform.
He believes that the threat faced by Bitcoin can’t be solved even by replacing Bitcoin core. While Mike Hearn’s statement does sound like the end is near, it is still to be seen whether the death of Bitcoin will be due to community’s reaction to his revelations or a slow, natural death driven by apathy, greed and self-serving actions of those few driving the Bitcoin community.