(credit: Trader Tim)
About a week ago, colleagues were sending me copies of a Medium post ricocheting all over the Internet: a crucial Bitcoin developer, Mike Hearn, was calling it quits. The announcement unsurprisingly spawned media speculation and opinion pieces with headlines like, "RIP Bitcoin, it’s time to move on." Bitcoin’s trading price in US dollars fell by about 10 percent in about 24 hours.
But take it from an admitted Bitcoin skeptic—the cryptocurrency isn’t anywhere close to being dead. At least, it's not dying anytime soon.
Hearn is certainly much more knowledgeable about Bitcoin than I am, and he outlines a compelling case for why Bitcoin is in crisis. I hadn’t known, for example, that the blockchain is controlled by a majority of miners based in China where outbound international traffic has high latency. I didn’t realize there’s a huge drag on completing Bitcoin-based transactions. And after reading Hearn’s previous piece arguing in favor of the Bitcoin XT fork, I didn’t realize so many people hated the idea. Users wanted the term banned entirely from a prominent Bitcoin forum.
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