Bitcoin, a distributed and decentralised digital currency dubbed “the currency of the Internet”, has been declared a failure by one of its most ardent supporters and developers. In a lengthy post on Medium , Mike Hearn states that “despite knowing that Bitcoin could fail all along, the now inescapable conclusion that it has failed still saddens me greatly.”
Hearn places Bitcoin’s failure squarely on the shoulders of the community, and internal politics, describing it as a system that is now controlled by a handful of people only, a complete opposite of the original goals of the currency as a decentralised monetary system. Most of the disagreements are around whether a key piece of Bitcoin’s technology should be adjusted so that it can support more transactions, the Bitcoin community has essentially been split between those in favor of increasing this limit and those opposed to it suggests Hearn. If you had never heard about Bitcoin before, would you care about a payments network that: Couldn’t move your existing money
Had wildly unpredictable fees that were high and rising fast
Allowed buyers to take back payments they’d made after walking out of shops, by simply pressing a button (if you aren’t aware of this “feature” that’s because Bitcoin was only just changed to allow it)
Is suffering large backlogs and flaky payments
… which is controlled by China
… and in which the companies and people building it were in open civil war?
I’m going to hazard a guess that the answer is no. The rise and fall of Bitcoin It should be noted that Bitcoin is often confused with Blockchain, which is the underlying protocol behind the technology of the currency. The strength behind Blockchain technology is in the authenticity of records, content and transactions, and its decentralised nature. Which […]
