Mike Hearn: Underfunding is Leaving Bitcoin Development in Crisis
Acclaimed bitcoinj developer Mike Hearn has expressed his concerns over the apparent lack of progress in the development of the bitcoin protocol. In an audio interview with Epicenter Bitcoin, Hearn indicated that there are simply no incentives for developers to spend time and effort on basic development, and that the bitcoin protocol is already suffering as a result: "I've been very worried for a long time that the core bitcoin system is radically underfunded and underdeveloped from where it needs to be." Because developers are not incentivised, he argued, they simply don't tend to tackle....
Related News
The news this past week has been dominated by the announcement of Mike Hearn leaving the Bitcoin scene for good. Hearn posted a very long and detailed explanation of why things are not going the way he thinks they should in the world of Bitcoin, and his words were gratefully picked up by mainstream media. But what is the hidden message behind these words? Even though a lot of people are on the fence regarding what Hearn said in his post on Medium, there are some valid points to be found in his comments. First of all, there is the problem of intermediary services and people trying to take....
Former core developer and one of Bitcoin’s earliest advocates Mike Hearn has left the Bitcoin space entirely after talking of a crisis of the core system, “the block chain itself,” as he calls it and sees a price collapse in the future. In the long, compelling read of his Medium post, Mike Hearn states the following sentences within the first minute of reading it, leaving little impression of his return to the Bitcoin community. From the start, I’ve always said the same thing: Bitcoin is an experiment and like all experiments, it can fail. So don’t invest what you can’t afford to lose. But....
For an industry recently shaken by the grasps of censorship on the most popular Bitcoin forums on the internet, where thousands of people interested in the tech turn to learn, the scorn for Mike Hearn has been telling. Hearn, who wrote in a Medium post he was leaving Bitcoin, has been trending in the Bitcoin industry for a fortnight now. So what did Hearn say? In his post, “The Resolution of the Bitcoin Experiment,” Hearn made numerous assertions, such as: But despite knowing that Bitcoin could fail all along, the now inescapable conclusion that it has failed still saddens me greatly. The....
Say what you like about Google, but it isn't an easy place to get hired at. The entrance interviews are notoriously tough, and it is a highly desired employer - which makes Mike Hearn's departure all the more notable. Hearn is an expert in low-level software development, who worked as a site reliability engineer at Google, and focused on account security and antispam. He has also been one of the leading lights in the bitcoin community, heading up the open source development team for bitcoinj, which is the Java implementation of the bitcoin protocol. He is leaving in part because of his....
Reaching consensus can be difficult, and that’s something Mike Hearn wanted to tell the world on January 14th. In a Medium post, he calls “The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment” long-time Bitcoin developer Mike Hearn has left the industry. The statement that is quite long goes into a very detailed testimony to why he’s left and that he sold all his bitcoins. Mike Hearn former Google engineer and the first person to implement Bitcoin in Java, lead developer of the controversial XT fork, and a person whose software he’s “written has been used by millions of users” is all done with the....