Are you ready to see over $5.7 billion go up in a puff of smoke? Well, stay tuned. That number is the market value of all the Bitcoin in circulation today. But according to at least one Bitcoin insider, the entire Bitcoin house of cards is about to collapse.
The insider with the courage to go public about Bitcoin’s impending doom: Mike Hearn, who wrote a scathing farewell message to the Bitcoin community – as well as everyone else – just last week.
Hearn’s concerns for Bitcoin’s prospects are both technical and political. Bitcoin’s technical challenges are reasonably straightforward: the blockchain – Bitcoin’s underlying framework and associated protocols – is experiencing growing pains.
Due to rather arcane limitations in the original blockchain configuration, it’s essentially running out of capacity. If someone doesn’t fix it, then Bitcoin transactions will take longer and longer and cost more and more, until the entire kit and caboodle stops working altogether.
The obvious answer, of course, is to fix the blockchain. As it turns out, such a fix isn’t particularly difficult. In fact, there are many possible ways to get Bitcoin out of this predicament. So what’s the problem?
That’s where Hearn’s political concerns for Bitcoin’s future kick in. He calls out a handful of issues in particular: “Developers of the ‘Bitcoin Core’ software … have refused to implement the necessary changes,” Hearn says. “Another is that the miners refuse to switch to any competing product… They have chosen instead to ignore the problem and hope it goes away.”
Read the entire article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2016/01/18/something-rotten-in-the-state-of-bitcoin.
Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: Antana and public domain.
