Even though a lot of people tend to ignore bitcoin altogether, everyone seems to have his or her own opinion about this popular cryptocurrency. It is not surprising to find a fair amount of people have deemed bitcoin to “fail” over the past years. In fact, several of these statements were uttered in the past twelve months. Bitcoin may be far from perfect, but there is no reason to think it has failed – or will fail – anytime soon.
3. PC Authority
It is not uncommon for technology websites to not have grasped the basic principles of bitcoin in the first place. PC Authority showed this in June of 2016, as the platform issued a new post explaining how bitcoin looks dead in the water. In fact, they uttered the words of a delusional developer who issued a similar statement in January of 2016. It seems rather strange to rehash this topic nearly six months later, but that is what has happened regardless.
In the article, PC Authority never further explains why they rehashed the developer’s words in the first place, nor why they did so over 5 months after the facts. It is evident this article was meant to capitalize on the bitcoin hype, rather than bring something original to the table. Interestingly enough, the article also paints a nice future for blockchain technology even if bitcoin were to fail. It remains to be seen if these custom bitcoin-less blockchains can work in the first place, though.
2. TransferWise’s Taavet Hinrikus
Everyone in the cryptocurrency world is well aware of how TransferWise has no love lost for bitcoin whatsoever. In fact, one could argue TransferWise sees bitcoin as a legitimate threat to their business model, due to its lower fees and cutting out the intermediary services, such as TransferWise. Things got a bit out of hand in April of 2016, when company CEO Taavet Hinrikus went on record to claim bitcoin is dead in the water.
At that time, bitcoin was going through a bit of a rough patch, even though there was no reason whatsoever to believe the cryptocurrency would cease to exist all of a sudden. Hinrikus stated how “real people do not use bitcoin”, which created quite a lot of backlash on social media. It is the sort of statement one would expect from a competing service provider who feels the heat bitcoin brings to the table. As we all know, bitcoin shot up in value throughout 2016, providing Hinrikus utterly wrong in his statement.
1. Mike Hearn
Early January 2016 was dominated by the statement issued by Mike Hearn, a former bitcoin developer. In a well-coordinated event with some of the world’s largest media outlets, Hearn tried to spread the word about how Bitcoin is a “failed experiment”. In the same message, Hearn also announced he would no longer develop bitcoin and switch allegiances to the R3 blockchain consortium. Many bitcoin enthusiasts were offended by this ludicrous statement.
Hearn quickly became persona non grata in the bitcoin world, as many people felt he was trying to bring bitcoin down by using mainstream media outlets to spread the word. Unfortunately for him, his words have had the opposite effect as bitcoin was one of the best-performing assets of 2016. Once the media attention quieted down, things went back to normal for bitcoin. Mike Hearn was not heard from again since January 2016.
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