Mike Hearn
Mike Hearn is a Bitcoin developer and former senior software engineer at Google, where he worked on Google Earth, Maps, Gmail, anti-spam and account security. He now works full time on the Bitcoin system doing app development, research and work on the protocol. He is the original author of Bitcoinj and a former contributor to Bitcoin Core. He quit Bitcoin in January 2016. One reason given was rising fees. See Mike Hearn’s blog: The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment.
How Mike Hearn Sold All His Bitcoins in 2016
On Jan. 15, 2016, former Bitcoin Core developer Mike Hearn left the Bitcoin community and industry with a highly controversial blog post entitled “The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment.”
Mainstream media outlets including Fusion, Business Insider, Yahoo and Wired, which urgently awaited for negative Bitcoin headlines to pick up, led the “Bitcoin is declared dead narrative,” happily announcing that “prominent Bitcoin developer declared the digital money dead.” Fusion, in particular, published an article entitled “Prominent Bitcoin developer declares the digital money dead,” describing Bitcoin as a failed experiment. It is an appropriate period to look back at these false narratives and misreporting of the Bitcoin industry as Bitcoin price recently reached its new all-time high at $1,220 in major Bitcoin markets including the US, Japan and China. Amid his exit, Hearn announced to the Bitcoin community that he had sold all of his Bitcoins. He noted that experiments or projects like Bitcoin could fail and told his followers that it isn’t an intelligent decision to invest in “what you can’t afford to lose.” “I have sold all my coins” Hearn further emphasized that he knew Bitcoin could fail all along and continued to imply that he served the Bitcoin community, industry and open source development network solely for the benefit of the Bitcoin industry.
He wrote:
For innovative and revolutionary projects or technologies like Bitcoin to succeed, it is important to help guide them through their early stages in development.
It can be argued that Bitcoin is still in its earlier stages of development as solutions like Segregated Witness (SegWit), TumbleBit, MimbleWimble, which are presumed to drastically scale the Bitcoin network and provide an unprecedented level of anonymity, are still inactivated and unimplemented.
External links
- @octskyward – Mike Hearn on Medium
- Mike Hearn – GitHub Repository
- https://plus.google.com/+MikeHearn Google+ – Mike Hearn]