Bitcoin will not fail, Mike Hearn will fail

A piece of news recently caused a stir in the Bitcoin world. Mike Hearn, a member of the Bitcoin core protocol developer team, announced that Bitcoin has failed as a social experiment and that he will withdraw from the core development team and sell all his Bitcoins. Exchanges have also been in turmoil recently. Cryptsy claimed that hackers stole 13,000 Bitcoins and 300,000 Litecoins, and declared bankruptcy due to insolvency. Under the influence of these two events, the price of Bitcoin also plummeted by 15%. Martians have talked a lot about the security issues of exchanges in previous articles. In this article, Martians will talk about whether the Bitcoin experiment has failed.

What is failure and who defines failure?

The public has always been unable to correctly understand that Bitcoin is a distributed Internet open source system, so people have various concerns: If the government declares Bitcoin illegal, will Bitcoin fail? If the founder of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, is arrested, will Bitcoin fail? If the largest Bitcoin exchange goes bankrupt, will Bitcoin fail? There are also some more "professional" concerns: If no one continues to mine, will Bitcoin fail? If the transfer capacity of Bitcoin cannot continue to expand, will Bitcoin fail?

First, let's define what the failure of the Bitcoin experiment means. The Bitcoin experiment is an attempt to establish a peer-to-peer Internet currency system that does not require a trusted central node based on cryptography and POW (proof of work) mechanisms. To this day, I think the Bitcoin experiment is still successful. Thousands of machines around the world are still working day and night to solve hash function problems in every corner of every continent. The Bitcoin system still completes a transfer confirmation every ten minutes and cannot be forged. The Bitcoin system is gaining recognition from more and more people, whether it is the amount of Bitcoin transfers, the number of Bitcoin users, the trading volume of exchanges, the computing power of the entire network, and even the price of Bitcoin, all of which are soaring. If this situation is called failure, then how do you define success?

In the past years, too many people have announced the "death" of Bitcoin, including well-known financial media, columnists, and even Nobel Prize winners in economics. Now there is only one newcomer - one of the Bitcoin core protocol developers. As an Internet open source protocol, anyone can become a developer, and anyone can make their own suggestions for upgrading the protocol. The so-called 5 years of core protocol development experience cannot be the source of its authority. As Kevin Kelly said, technology has its own development logic and its own life, and no one can stop it.

So who defines the failure of Bitcoin? Everyone in the Bitcoin community. Maybe you are a Bitcoin speculator, maybe you are a Bitcoin industry practitioner, maybe you are a Bitcoin system gold digger, maybe you are a Bitcoin network user. Only when most people abandon Bitcoin can we declare the failure of the Bitcoin experiment. But in the past years, the Bitcoin community has experienced too much, from the collapse of exchanges with 80% market share, to the Bitcoin protocol upgrade leading to double spending, to the trial of Silk Road, to the governments of several countries declaring Bitcoin illegal, and the tireless demonization of major media... But we have seen that Bitcoin has shown great resilience, as Nietzsche said: What doesn't kill me makes me stronger.

Is Mike Hearn right to be concerned?

Mike Hearn's accusation is not groundless. He made several main points:

1. The adjustment of block size cannot gain a consensus in the community;

2. The Bitcoin system is currently completely controlled by China;

3. The community is split and the XT protocol is attacked.

Regarding the issue of block size adjustment, Martians think it is just the icing on the cake, a sweet issue. An Internet company needs to add new hard disks and bandwidth due to a surge in the number of users. Maybe a slow upgrade will affect the user experience, but this is not a matter of life and death for Bitcoin. As for how to upgrade the block size, it is a question of how technology adapts to reality. For example, should we use the 2M solution or the 8M solution? Should we use the Unlimited solution in one step, or continue to use the Classic solution with sporadic patches? Martians think that no matter which solution is chosen, it is irrelevant, just like choosing between apples and pears. This issue is obviously not important enough for the Bitcoin community, otherwise it would have been solved long ago, just like when Bitcoin encountered a scalability attack, the community upgraded the protocol within a week to solve the problem.

Regarding Bitcoin being controlled by China, Mike Hearn has made the mistake of conspiracy theory and holism again. There is no so-called country that can control Bitcoin. Bitcoin miners are individual individuals. There will always be a period of time when the computing power of a region is in an advantageous position. There may be many reasons: new technology is invented in this region, the energy price in this region is cheaper, and the people in this region are more accepting of Bitcoin... and every miner is an individual with self-conscious interests. Once there is a problem with the Bitcoin network or the Bitcoin protocol, they are the most worried because it is directly related to their economic interests. Mike Hearn believes that the community should be led by elites, not controlled by the mob. This view has directly violated the philosophical principle of Bitcoin - the decentralization of trust.

Regarding the attack on the XT protocol, Mike Hearn believes that the community has been split and there is no way to remedy it. This is simply ridiculous. The XT protocol was attacked so that the running nodes could not survive, which just reflects the degree of its weakness. How come the current Bitcoin network has not been broken by DDOS attacks? How come the running nodes of the current Bitcoin network have not been attacked to the point where they cannot go online? In addition, the attack by Bitcoin miners on the running nodes of the XT protocol is very rational and natural. Under the POW mechanism, it is because of the terrifying computing power barrier that it is difficult to create counterfeit coins. Although XT itself does not admit it, most miners have already considered it to be a copycat coin. As we all know, it is very normal to launch a computing power attack on a copycat coin.

The community is not hesitant, it’s just that the block size issue is not important enough; Chinese miners do not want to monopolize more computing power, it’s just that Western miners are too inefficient and their technology is too poor to live up to the expectations; XT is not innocent and pitiful, it is natural for counterfeiters to be attacked.

An inglorious exit

In the past period of time, what happened is actually very simple, that is, the election behavior within the Bitcoin community. Under the framework of the open source protocol, everyone can put forward their own political propositions (that is, to transform and upgrade the Bitcoin core protocol), or they can use a company as a unit to express their opinions, such as Coinbase publicly supporting XT. The final votes are counted by the mining pool, and each miner can choose the constitution he agrees with to vote. Once more than 51% of the computing power agrees, the protocol will change. This is a very free democratic system. Everyone can submit proposals and everyone can participate in voting, provided that you must be the maintainer of the Bitcoin network protocol and have computing power. Whether you like it or not, this is how the Bitcoin protocol POW principle works.

If we use this analogy, then what happened to Mike Hearn is no different from losing an election in the real world, except that his exit was a little uglier. In a typical exit, one would always congratulate the opponent for winning more support, hope that the entire community will prosper, and say that even if he is not elected, he will still do his duty. However, what Mike Hearn did was very ungracious. He directly withdrew from the Bitcoin community and, regardless of his influence in the Bitcoin community, simply said that the Bitcoin experiment had failed. He claimed to be an expert elite (consensus of experts) and could not associate with those "ordinary people" (ordinary people picking whatever policies make sense to them), which in itself was a very immature political performance.

Mike Hearn did not simply withdraw from the Bitcoin community. He joined R3, a company that calls itself a blockchain company and is trying to build a private blockchain for large financial institutions such as banks to use. Martians have repeatedly said that blockchain and Bitcoin are symbiotic. Without the incentive mechanism of Bitcoin, there will be no more secure blockchain, and all kinds of competing coins, including all kinds of blockchain projects, including R3, will end up in vain. When Mike Hearn joined R3, he also lost his objective and neutral attitude, because the two blockchains are in a competitive relationship, so his conclusion that the so-called Bitcoin experiment has failed is more like a marketing campaign for its own products.

at last

Martians here would like to express their personal gratitude to Mike Hearn for his contribution to the community over the past few years, and hope that he can achieve what he wants at R3. Bitcoin has just begun as a social experiment, and all signs point to one conclusion, that is, it is booming. Bitcoin is an open source network protocol based on peer-to-peer technology, with strong updating and adaptability. Unless human wisdom to solve problems has been exhausted, it will never fail. Even if the name of Bitcoin can fail, as a whole, human beings will never stop pursuing freedom. Failure will only come when those individuals with weak wills admit failure.

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