Prominent Bitcoin developer declares the digital currency a failure

One of digital currency Bitcoin’s long-time supporters and developers has decided to walk away from it. His reason: Bitcoin has failed.

Mike Hearn (photo), devoted long-time Bitcoin enthusiast who eventually quit a job at Google to work on Bitcoin’s technology full-time, wrote a long blog post on Medium on Wednesday outline why he’s lost faith in it. “The fundamentals are broken and whatever happens to the price in the short term, the long term trend should probably be downwards. I will no longer be taking part in Bitcoin development and have sold all my coins,” he said.

Why has Bitcoin failed?
Mike Hearn answer: „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. Worse still, the network is on the brink of technical collapse. The mechanisms that should have prevented this outcome have broken down, and as a result there’s no longer much reason to think Bitcoin can actually be better than the existing financial system.”

One of the most disturbing things that took place over the course of 2015 is that the flow of information to investors and users has dried up, according to Hearn.
„In the span of only about eight months, Bitcoin has gone from being a transparent and open community to one that is dominated by rampant censorship and attacks on bitcoiners by other bitcoiners. This transformation is by far the most appalling thing I have ever seen, and the result is that I no longer feel comfortable being associated with the Bitcoin community.”

Hearn concludes that „Bitcoin has entered exceptionally dangerous waters. Previous crises, like the bankruptcy of Mt Gox, were all to do with the services and companies that sprung up around the ecosystem. But this one is different: it is a crisis of the core system, the block chain itself. More fundamentally, it is a crisis that reflects deep philosophical differences in how people view the world: either as one that should be ruled by a “consensus of experts”, or through ordinary people picking whatever policies make sense to them.”