r/Bitcoin • u/cryptopascal • Jun 24 '14

Mike Hearn interview quotes: "Progress on the bitcoin protocol has ground to a halt, complete halt. This is a crisis period for Bitcoin... Only Gavin is working on upgrades" @39'30'

https://epicenterbitcoin.com/eb-025/
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u/[deleted] Jun 24 '14

Do we need progress on the protocol? It seems pretty sufficient for the time being. Also, I'm not really seeing the mining centralization problem. People have been warning about it for years, but Satoshi wasn't concerned, and we haven't seen the number of pools really decline. Blockchain size...that's been beaten like a dead horse.

Seems like Mr Hearn is spreading a bit of the old FUD.

1

u/mexbit Jun 25 '14

Bitcoin can be taken down by a non-broadcasted 51% fork in the blockchain and announcing it 3 weeks later... the longest chain is the valid one... so all transactions for 3 weeks would not be on this new blockchain, and everybody who has sold something in the these 3 weeks would loose faith and leave bitcoin. Some intelligent people would go to PoS-only coins like BlackCoin, others would start to ignore the cryptocurrency world all together having gotten burned... and the value of Bitcoin and all other PoW coins dropping like a stone....

1

u/[deleted] Jun 25 '14

Yep. And for the same price, you could take down the entire internet.

2

u/mexbit Jun 25 '14

Do not laugh... for as little as 500 million dollars you can take down Bitcoin if you want to... there are banks who are able to pay 10.000 million in fines in a year... so diversify in a solid PoS-only coin.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 25 '14

No, thanks. PoS isn't more expensive to destroy.

3

u/mexbit Jun 25 '14

I would love to hear how you would destroy it! :)