Image: Science Picture Co./Corbis After developing software for Bitcoin for five years, Mike Hearn has sold his coins and is backing out.
In an article on Medium , Hearn details the multitude of reasons why Bitcoin has ultimately failed, such as a warring community, lack of necessary improvements on a system that has reached its limits, a dominating minority and lack of communication.
"Bitcoin is an experiment and like all experiments, it can fail," Hearn writes. "What was meant to be a new, decentralized 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."
Bitcoins are a decentralized digital alternative to currency that began back in 2009. There is no central holding entity, like a bank or a government, which means the community controls transactions. Here is a quick explainer video that Mashable made in 2014: Hearn writes that individuals and companies that speak in favor of increasing the limit size of incoming transaction are silenced — banned from forums and hit with DDOS attacks as described by Forbes .
According to the New York Times , the last six months have seen developers receiving death threats and service attacks that have brought down entire regions of Internet.
Hearn’s own limit-increasing program, Bitcoin XT , which aims to allow more transactions for each second and speed up the transaction process, was met with attacks that effectively stopped it completely. Despite the attacks, Hearn writes there are still people trying to develop alternatives to Bitcoin Core, the project that maintains the program that runs the Bitcoin network, that increase limits.
Hearn continues, saying the network is on the verge of a technical collapse, the methods to prevent that have broken down, and, "as a result there’s no longer […]
