Wiki / People / Mike Hearn

Mike Hearn

From the Bitcoin Takeover Wiki · ✓ 4 sources · 0 podcast anchors · built 2026-11-13

Former Google engineer, bitcoinj author and co-creator of Bitcoin XT, who declared Bitcoin a failed experiment in January 2016.

◆ Takeover vieweditorial · opinion, labelled

The wiki's angle: Hearn's exit essay is the block size war's most quoted primary document, and Fork Wars pairs it with the XT release as the bookends of his chapter.[2][4]

Contents

  1. Developer
  2. Bitcoin XT
  3. Exit
  4. References

Developer

Hearn is a former Google engineer and the original author of bitcoinj[1]. The Fork Wars timeline notes that Satoshi's April 2009 letter on Visa-scale volume was a reply to him[2].

Bitcoin XT

Hearn created Bitcoin XT in 2014, and in 2015 it adopted Gavin Andresen's BIP-101[3]. In his own words, “some long-term developers (including me) got together and developed the necessary code to raise the limit” and released it “in a modified version of the software that we branded Bitcoin XT”[4].

Exit

On 14 January 2016 Hearn wrote that “the now inescapable conclusion” was that Bitcoin had failed, and that he would no longer take part in development and had sold all his coins[4]. He argued the capacity limit had not been raised because the chain was “controlled by Chinese miners, just two of whom control more than 50% of the hash power”[4].

References

  1. secondaryBitcoin Wiki (en.bitcoin.it), “Mike Hearn” [archived]
  2. btkFork Wars: the block size war timeline (Bitcoin Takeover) [archived]
  3. secondaryBitcoin Wiki (en.bitcoin.it), “Bitcoin XT” [archived]
  4. primaryMike Hearn, “The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment”, 14 Jan 2016 (archived copy) [archived]

Related

Bitcoin XT
Mike Hearn's fork of Bitcoin Core that shipped BIP-101 in August 2015 and opened the public, client-versus-cli
Gavin Andresen
Satoshi Nakamoto's successor as Bitcoin's lead developer, author of BIP-101 and BIP-109, and later a casualty
Block size war
The 2015–2017 fight over Bitcoin's 1 MB limit that produced the first durable chain split.
Categories: People
Ask about this article: >_ terminal · Onion mirror: http://btctkvroa6xsq25wmpvvlpkcgss7724zk6fm765fvtuunfgxw74j2pyd.onion/wiki/mike-hearn/
>_ ask the wiki