Mike Hearn Is Wrong, Bitcoin Isn't Dead

"I think the broader issue that concerns me is that the level of discourse and communication in the community is very disappointing, almost to the point that I think an intervention may be needed, so it's made clear that certain things aren't acceptable, and that applies to those on both sides of the debate. Within the space people accuse each others of horrendous things, be it towards Gavin, or our team and it isn't helpful, or acceptable when you have the majority of participants volunteering as the hostile environment makes participating in the project much harder. The big issue is the global potential of the technology, and what it can do for the world and in that discussion it's not right to argue between technical proposals and people shouldn't become so entrenched in believing that if they don't get their own way, every other way has to fail, that type of viewpoint is not helpful. If you look at the evolution of free software and Linux, it was a very different model then and even though there were differences between different builds, there was a view that free open source software deserved a place in datacenters and I think that's the larger issue; This technology clearly has so much promise and the potential to change finance, remove systemic risk, improve access and that still needs to be the focus, but when people get so tied up in what I believe to be a very short-term blip on the radar of Bitcoin, a moment in time similar to the security problems that early Bitcoin companies such as Mt Gox had, however I do believe it's important for people to realise that this is bigger than one person, bigger than one company but really we should ask the question of how do we focus on the help of the community so it is inviting for more to participate," Hill says.

Carding saw censorship in how certain scaling proposals and materials promoting them had been handled. He also believed overzealous moderation had caused damage.

Hill didn't address the moderation question directly. Instead, he laid out what putting scalability front and center had achieved: "Without getting into how various communities moderate or decide what content they publish, the key thing is that the community has benefited from scalability being raised as an issue and it has been worthwhile as there's been a lot of clear action which has resulted in a lot of good work, including a lot of great data on safe margins and the appropriate ways to do this, but when the overall community of scientists, contributors and miners come back and say they've found a better way to approach scalability, we need to respect and accept that, finding ways to support the solution, rather than saying 'My proposal didn't win, so all the others are a failure' Our team [Blockstream] had a number of proposals in Hong Kong, beyond Segregated Witness, many of which are probably not going to be used in the way that scalability is addressed, because they were best ideas at the time, but there's been collaboration, discussions and improvements since," Hill says.

Will Hearn's exit and the new focus on scaling push toward resolution?

"I think there's already a clear consensus and that everyone I speak to, including my co-founders who are involved in Bitcoin Core have agreed that scalability is important and improving the transaction throughput is necessary, there has been a fairly unanimous discussion within the community that the best way to do that is by evaluating the best science and collecting real data to make good decisions and I think there is widespread agreement in that community that the current proposals achieve a lot of that, whether or not that is done with a hard or soft fork, or the ordering are details which still need to be discussed, but for the majority of the community there's a real consensus on how to move forward," Hill says.

Is scalability blocking Bitcoin adoption?

"I certainly agree that the ways in which the conversation has happened hasn't been a positive experience and has been a distraction for many, I think fighting technical debates in the media, rather than amongst those who are actually writing and contributing code has not been helpful, but I'm very fortunate to be in my position, I'm able to see the amount of companies starting Bitcoin projects, I see major financial institutions talking about integrating the technology, I see a large number of very positive things every day, all of which continue to convince me that this ecosystem and technology still has the potential to achieve a huge amount of positive change in the world. The fact that sometimes the process is painful, given the fact that it's open-source, happening in open communities where there's a lot of debate is just the reality of how open-source works," Hill says.

Carding circled back to Bitcoin's uniqueness. Other open source projects hadn't faced growing pains of this scale, he suggested, and such struggles could be expected for a network of Bitcoin's scope and novelty.

Hill pushed back. "Every community has an element of terminal uniqueness, that we are so different to everything else, but in reality, this has happened several times. In the early days of the IETF, there were reports of fist-fights at meeting and people passing out because of stress, it was a very difficult, contentious process. ICANN had similar experiences when the commercialisation started to happen and people were trying to decide how open it should be and who controls it. There have been huge, drawn out battles over several years, some of which are still occurring as the principals of a free global internet was not predetermined and there was a period of time where it was still considered the US government's network, but dedicated people went through the painful process, continuing to fight for the principals that they believed in, and it was these people who despite all the noise actually built the frameworks that we all depend on and I think the same thing is occurring with Bitcoin, there are dedicated, principled people who despite the personal toll it takes on them, care enough to continue contributing and I think it's these people who will define what success is," he says.

More on Blockstream at the company's website.