Mike Hearn, a five-year industry veteran and one of the most well-known developers and advocates of Bitcoin, has come to the conclusion that the "experiment" has failed.
Hearn said in a post on Medium that the fundamentals are broken and despite short-term gains, the long-term outlook for Bitcoin will probably trend downwards. As such, he will no longer be taking part in the development of the cryptocurrency and has sold all of his coins.
Multiple reasons were given to support his theory, chief among them being that the system is now completely controlled by just a handful of people and that the network is on the brink of technical collapse.
The technical collapse Hearn references has to do with an "entirely artificial" capacity cap of one megabyte per block, something that Hearn says was put in place long ago as a temporary kludge. Remarkably, the temporary fix is still in place which means the network's capacity is now almost entirely exhausted. When networks run out of capacity, Hearn notes, they become very unreliable.
Bitcoin valuation chart by Coindesk
The simple solution would be to raise the capacity limit but because just two Chinese miners control more than 50 percent of the hash power, that hasn't happened for a number of reasons.
If you're at all interested in Bitcoin and the technicalities of it, I'd encourage you to give Hearn's article a read. Of course, it's worth noting that this is just the opinion of one person within the community (well, formerly). Only time will tell whether or not his prophecies are fulfilled.
