You’ve heard of Mike Hearn? Well, if not, you need to check who he is before reading his dismal appraisal of the state of Bitcoin…
Here’s the intro:
It looks like a whining drunken women. Disgusting.
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Yeah, just read it. I was sighing and shaking my head a lot.
My main concern for bitcoin is the centralization of mining. When a single company can manufacture miners more efficiently than others, it could eventually lead to 51%+ control.
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2 Chinese guys already control over 50% hashing power.
All the more reason to stay (in) SAFE (and buy).
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Im staying in SAFE, selling has never crossed my mind. I love bitcoin but its time for safe to take over.
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- Hearn is full of crap
- Prior to Google, worked for the government (go figure where in the government)
- Authored a failed Bitcoin enlargement fork that didn’t take off
- TFA is nonsense. FCT makes sense.
- Time for users to be able to pay more to get to the front of the queue. To hell with crypto socialism.
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Everything he wrote is stand corrected. I have been worry about this for over three years. And nothing has been done. I agree heartily, and which is why I am here in the first place.
But remember guys, don’t put all eggs in one basket. Litecoin, ethereum, dash, nxt, and other coins will simply move up and take bitcoin’s place soon or later if the miners don’t response. This is my biggest pet peeve with blockchain, miners have a say in matters, not the community node operators. Miners have the ultimate power, one ring to rule them all, kinda of thing.
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Adam B Levine of LTBnetwork said that he, Andreas and Stephanie recorded an episode today discussing their views on Hearn’s letters. I expect the podcast will be available on the Letstalkbitcoin.com tomorrow or the next day. I am looking forward to that talk. When it is published you can find it here https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/category/episodes
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This may be controversial but i can see where hearn is coming from. I reluctantly agree with Most of what he said.
Proof of work creates a clear conflict of interest between the core developers and the miners, Ant pool, f2pool, btccpool. Mining will always be controlled behind the great firewall of china. Effecting bitcoin from ever reaching its full potential transaction speed. These 3 Chinese pools will remain in control because patents don’t effect them and manufacturing and hosting miners are so cheap for them. They want to lower thier risk and focus on maximising ROI. But the core developers want to hard fork which apparently is essential to scale and reduce transaction fees. Mike and gavins XT proposal has been months of hard work which has been rejected because of potential risk to the pool operators profit margins. Bitcoin will never die but faces the danger of being able to scale quick enough to forever remain the most widely used crypto currency.
I am a miner and trader of bitcoin and obsessed with crypto currency concepts, but i believe proof of work may have some limitations. This is why i feel SafeCoin’s proof of resource has the right combination to have that network effect. I see safecoin being more stable, future proof and practical than bitcoin. Proof of work is great but a global crypto currency being backed by proof of resource is a valuable asset and the way forward in my opinion.
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It’s funny because Proof of Work was the first basis of Aaron Swartz’s Squaring the Triangle: Secure, Decentralized, Human-Readable Names - off which Namecoin bases its operation.
Proof of Resource is exponentially more valuable and it gives rewards relatively, instead of absolutely. Proof of resource allows small players to work locally. They can work with what is relative to them, while still being able to contribute globally.
It’s a duality that is not solved by the blockchain. Rather, in this scheme it’s worked around by giving farmers the ability to work with their local sources, while allowing others to use what they give as the Network allows. What they have is unique to them, and they have control over their point of view, but the clients are allowed to mutate what is allocated to them - their storage.
In a way, it’s a system that is personalized for everyone - data storage, currency, and hopefully namespaces as well.
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He isn’t full of crap IMO. I told you before there were flaws in the system. Remember??
And did you ever heard of [Bitcoin spam attacks][1]? I’m sure you did. For under $10K some folks can slow the blockchain down with a click of the mouse. I did a transaction a few weeks ago and it took over 14 hours to get trough. And these where just little attacks. Imagine some dictator spending a few 100K on killing the blockchain. It would go trough it’s knees quite fast. Right at the moment you, and thousands of other people are checking in their hotels rooms. Good luck with that technology.
It’s like a nice looking car that starts to fail at 60 MPH.
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I think the author has good points, we’re in for a wild ride it seems.
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A bitter diatribe from a developer who was kicked out of bitcoin core. Bitcoin is by far the most successful cryptocurrency to date, whether you measure it by market cap, hashing power, number of transactions, number of developers working on the protocol etc. Time to add this to the list:
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That’s like someone in the mid 90s saying that the internet was great for sending email, but it would always be too slow for streaming video.
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That’s the big difference. Networks cards were able to become faster. The Blockchain isn’t so far. Even Ethereum has quite a small limit. So we’ve seen years of crypto’s using a blockchain, but none of them have scaled so far that they can handle like 200 Ts/sec. The internet in the 90’s was growing. The blockchain isn’t (well in storage it is 
) but not in Ts/sec.
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I think it’s way too early to write off the ability of blockchains to scale. Sidechains will be able to handle 4Billion transactions/second.
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well, in information technology we see this incredible exponential growth all over the place. From storage to CPU’s etc. But in the max. number of transactions in Blockchains we’ve seen none of that so far. And I already had to wait for 14 hours for a MAID transaction some months ago. So I would say they should really hurry up. And in the OP we see on of the Devs from Bitcoin leaving because he doesn’t see any progress either. I really like Bitcoin and blockchains, but they need to fix this quite fast.
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But that’s a function of the slowness of humans to make a decision and has got nothing to do with blockchain technology itself right? Besides, by just about any measure: transaction volume, wallets, hashing power the Bitcoin blockchain displays exponential growth. I agree with you that the problem needs to be fixed and the block size increased. Segregated Witness should be implemented soon (all the miners are on board) which will increase capacity by a factor of 4.
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