About this article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2016/01/19/r-i-p-bitcoin-its-time-to-move-on/Hello Wadhwa,
I read your article in the Washington Post with surprise.
I heard you talk many times before and you seemed like a fair guy.
However with this article, you just lost all your credibility, and just shows how little you know about bitcoin.
First of all, about Mike Hearn, he tried to impose on everybody bitcoin XT, which was a version of bitcoin intended to hijack the bitcoin core.
The community rejected him and his project, and because of this, he had the rage quit we all saw.
Also, just to show you how "Core developer" Mike Hearn was, you can see his contributions to the bitcoin protocol here:
https://bitcoin.org/en/developmentIf you do a CTRL+F on that website, you will find Mike Hearn in the end of the list with 3 corrections, while top developers have 3000 and 1000, so this is just to show you how insignificant Mike Hearn is.
The block size increase will happen and it will be done by the Core developers consensus, inline with the community, not by one guy that wants to hijack bitcoin.
If you want to hear a valid opinion of what is going on in the bitcoin World:
https://medium.com/@bramcohen/whiny-ragequitting-cab164b1e88#.w7s7vid2jNow regarding other comments you did about bitcoin, such as:
"Bitcoin was born with serious flaws."Which flaws? the need for consensus for changes?
Decentralization?
Not being subject to Governments, laws, taxes?
"It was unregulated and provided anonymity, so it rapidly became a haven for drug dealers and anarchists."My God, how stupid can one be to write such things. Let me ask you this: do you know what is the currency most used for Drug Trafficking and all the crime around the World? Do you? It's called U.S Dollar.
Why don't you make an article saying RIP U.S dollar, as almost ALL the crimes in the world, Billions, Trillions of U.S dollars are flowing in the crime market?
And you know what? The U.S dollar is anonymous too. If I give you a dollar bill in hand, no one will ever know when that dollar bill was transferred to you. Can you trace that? At least with bitcoin all transactions are written in the blockchain, can be verified by everyone. Transparency. What is the transparency of the U.S Dollar?
"A tiny committee of five core developers that controls the Bitcoin codebase has become the Star Chamber that guides the future of Bitcoin."Those developers are aligned with the community and take decisions with a consensus in the community. Take them as the 5 ministers of bitcoin. If you look the the U.S government or any government, the guys on the top of the chain are also few.
Does that make all governments a failure?
" And, with the majority of Bitcoin being owned by the small group that started promoting it, it has been compared to a Ponzi scheme. "By that view, the whole World is a ponzi scheme, as the top 1% own more than the rest 99%.
"Exchanges built on top of it also had severe security vulnerabilities."Oh, sure. what about the $1 Billion dollar heist in the banking world?
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-08-04/hackers-take-1-billion-a-year-from-company-accounts-banks-won-t-indemnifyI could write more, but to be honest you are not worth the time.
So good luck with your 10% ROI yearly on your S&P investments ;-) Ah, wait, I forgot everything is collapsing now. No worries, wait 10 more years and you may recover all your losses, with 1 to 10% ROI.
I'll stick to my bitcoins in the meantime, with a ROI of 38500 times since its creation.
You will swallow all your words about bitcoin, time will show you how history is built.
Enjoy the U.S Dollar.
Regards,
Samus.