Bitcoin in the Headlines is a weekly analysis of media and its impact. fire, newspaper Long-time bitcoin enthusiast and developer Mike Hearn officially “left” the open-source project this week, making clear a previously quiet departure by slamming the door in the form of an impassioned if highly contentious open letter to the community.
The former Google employee, whose contributions to the open-source transaction network include the widely used library BitcoinJ, and crowdfunding application Lighthouse, went so far as to proclaim the bitcoin project had “failed”, a narrative that was seized by global press.
At press time, Hearn’s exit had been profiled by news outlets as diverse and far-reaching as The New York Times , The Guardian , Fusion , PC World and Fortune , all of which emphasized his declaration that the project should be considered dead despite its position as the longest-running blockchain and digital currency with the highest market capitalization.
Adding fuel to the fire were damning comments that sought to paint Blockstream co-founder and bitcoin developer Gregory Maxwell as a villain in the ongoing debate over whether the open-source project should be scaled to accommodate more users or prioritize its emphasis on decentralization.
Hearn wrote: "Why has Bitcoin failed? 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." Perhaps most damning were statements that aimed to paint the network as "on the brink of technical collapse" and no better than "the existing financial system".
But, while publicizing an important technical debate, the media’s emphasis on using Hearn’s post as a primary reference did much to color the conversation in terms of his highly unique categorization of […]
