
Major Bitcoin supporter quits, says it's a failure - judgementday
http://www.forbes.com/sites/theopriestley/2016/01/15/bitcoin-declared-an-inescapable-failure/#2715e4857a0b73180b9b9bf8
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maxerickson
Previous discussion of Mike Hearn leaving the bitcoin:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10905118](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10905118)

Does this article add anything interesting?

I guess there is also some overlap with
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10909886](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10909886).

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cwyers
The upvote and downvote buttons are really tiny on my phone and I downvoted by
mistake. Can someone upvote this to offset my ineptness?

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donatj
I do this all the time. I really wish you could change your vote.

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dang
That's coming.

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beeboop
Firefox on Android seems to render much better now, not sure if that was
intentional effort, but if it was, thank you.

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dang
Thank pmontra!

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10880714](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10880714)

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marknutter
In case you're victim to Forbes' ridiculous attack on users who've installed
adblock: [http://pastebin.com/raw/wPvNaAGz](http://pastebin.com/raw/wPvNaAGz)

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joosters
Adblocking here, and the only thing I see is the stupid 'quote of the day'
prior to viewing the article. What attack have I dodged?

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mgbmtl
I think he meant an ideological attack on our choice of tools.

The website displays a message asking us to disable our ad/tracking blocker to
view the article.

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gavazzy
But really, Forbes asked users to disable their adblockers, and then delivered
malware: [http://www.tripwire.com/state-of-security/security-data-
prot...](http://www.tripwire.com/state-of-security/security-data-
protection/forbes-website-used-to-spread-malware-but-what-can-other-
businesses-learn/)

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bobsgame
I can see how he would feel it is a technical failure from his perspective as
a core developer, especially having been frustrated at having valid solutions
adopted, but it is unlikely that Bitcoin is going anywhere, it's too widely
supported at this point. I think we will end up seeing those features adopted
eventually out of necessity and perhaps this sort of blog post is an attempt
to try and give the community a push, having run out of alternatives. I hope
he comes back once the dust settles a bit.

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enginn
One more for
[https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoinobituaries/](https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoinobituaries/)

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oelmekki
There is something the article seems not to point out: this looks like a
failure if bitcoin is the dominant cryptocurrency, but all those conclusions
seem to tend toward a success in a ecosystem of altcoins.

If the problem of bitcoin is purely core members deciding about configuration
settings, altcoins are not affected.

If the problem is the blockchain not being able to support the massive amount
of transactions, here too, having alternative blockchains to divide the load
will help.

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madeofpalk
Doesn't alternative blockchains mean different currencies? As in, one retailer
might support bitcoinA, but I only have bitcoinB and bitcoinC so all my
bitcoin(n) are actually worthless to this retailer?

Fragmentation doesn't seem like the most healthy thing for any ecosystem, esp.
an 'underground currency'.

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oelmekki
Yep, by altcoin, I mean variants like litecoin, dogecoin, etc (there are
already tons of them).

Indeed, this will become an exchange problem, especially since it's already
difficult to get merchants to allow bitcoin payments.

But that's something payment gateways can handle by themselves. I often buy
things priced in USD on the web with my EUR account, and gateways handle the
change transparently (although with a fee).

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madeofpalk
Your comment on payment gateways and regional currencies is fair.

But, is the end game for bitcoin for me to be able to purchase my lunch with
it? Because I can't do that now, and I can't see how replacing the one
'bitcoin' with a dozen variants is going to help.

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kronomikon
You can buy your lunch (or dinner) with Bitcoin in NL, BE, DE, FR, and UK via
[http://www.thuisbezorgd.nl/en/](http://www.thuisbezorgd.nl/en/)

~~~
adevine
But does anyone actually do that? Given all the bitcoin speculation and
volatility, what percentage of transactions are actually someone paying for
goods and services vs trading for hard currency to speculate.

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madeofpalk
I've always thought of bitcoin itself to never be useful, but it will pave the
way for a newer 'currency' or the blockchain would be used to build 'next
generation payment networks' used by the Big Banks.

Bank could build upon 'the blockchain' to let me do a bank transfer in less
than 2 days, or see my credit card transactions be cleared instantly.

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conception
Just to clear the air, there is nothing stopping your bank from doing either
of those things. It's being done, in fact, just about everywhere but the US.

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madeofpalk
Sure. I'm in Australia, and those are problems sometimes.

My general point was that I imagine most banking systems are legacy and
archaic, and if they ever wanted to improve them Bitcoin could be s potential
implementation detail for a modern system.

