Bits Byte 0
The Guardian reports that Mike Hearn, “a longtime senior developer on bitcoin and the former chair of the bitcoin foundation’s law and policy committee, announced in a blogpost that he would be selling his coins and quitting development on the project,” because he has concluded that bitcoin is a failure.
Of course it is. It’s been a mug’s game from the start, a Ponzi scheme open only to techies with full pockets of real money, an elitist hipster con, suckering those who think that they are k3wl and l33t just because they understand “blockchain,” an electronic Enron enticing economic illiterates enamored of their magical computing boxes.
Here’s a short piece from the article:
But the main reason why XT never took off was the failure of the other major bottleneck: the miners.
Bitcoin is supposed to be a decentralised currency. Anyone can download the entire history of bitcoin transactions, and devote computing power to verifying future transactions (called mining). For a change such as the switch to XT to succeed, more than half of the computing power on the bitcoin network has to support it by updating their own software accordingly.
But very few people bother to mine for bitcoin. It’s expensive in terms of computer hardware, time and electricity so it is very difficult to beat professionally equipped outlets in the race for rewards. Those amateurs who do mine largely do so as part of pools, who share both computing power and rewards. Those pools, however, are also centrally controlled. As a result, Hearn points out, just two individuals control more than 50% of the power of the network. He adds that “over 95% of hashing power was controlled by a handful of guys sitting on a single stage” at a recent bitcoin conference.
Afterthought:
Ask me nicely, I’ll tell you what I really think.
