"Is Bitcoin Dead? Not the Part that Matters"
Michael J Casey works on blockchain-based solutions for the Digital Currency Initiative at the MIT Media Lab. He is also a former Wall Street Journal reporter, and the author of several books including "The Age of Cryptocurrency", which he authored with Paul Vigna.
In this piece, Casey examines recent events in the bitcoin world that culminated in the departure of developer Mike Hearn, providing his perspective on the resulting debate.
#CoinDeskE tu, TechCrunch?
Like many in the digital currency community, I’m tired of the "bitcoin is dead" line that has permeated mainstream coverage of high-profile software developer Mike Hearn’s decision to quit the "failed" bitcoin experiment.
Yet if we contemplate this misguided storyline, there's much to learn from it. It's up to those of us who believe this technology truly matters and that, in some shape or form, it will change the world, to shift the narrative.
Let's use this opportunity to restart the public conversation.
The first thing to acknowledge is that the doomsayers might be partly right. In one, narrow sense, bitcoin as a mass-adopted currency is dead. Not technically, of course – it would take the deletion of all versions of the blockchain ledger to kill it – but socially.
Bitcoin simply won’t be, not any time soon, a replacement for the dollar. See more here: