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Mike Hearn

Founder & Lead Developer, Hydraulic Software · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

engineerfounderLinkedIn ↗plan99.net ↗

Hearn was an early Bitcoin Core contributor who developed the Bitcoinj library and created the Lighthouse crowdfunding app, later serving as lead platform engineer for Corda at R3. He previously spent eight years as a senior software engineer at Google and later founded Hydraulic Software.

11statements → 8claims → 6claims resolved → 100%fully supported → 4.18/5average certainty → 2.27/5average debate potential → 6said about them ↓

6 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 2 not checkable as stated how the 8 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

2 predictions · 6 assertions · 1 opinion · 2 insights · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 8 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 6 are resolved, and 2 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Mike argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Prediction Held up
Hearn: Reaching Bitcoin capacity limits will kick users out of the system
“At worst, things break quite badly, but even at best, even if things don't break, some users won't be able to use Bitcoin, right? They will be kicked out of the system, effectively. There won't be enough capacity to handle them.”
Mike Hearn Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 3:22 a16z Podcast | Bitcoin's Growing Pains -- and Possibilities

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
100% certainty 3
100% certainty 4
100% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

How they sound: speaking style how? →

273 words/min while actually speaking · 32.3 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Mike Hearn: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 2,597 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Mike Hearn said on the a16z Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Prediction Held up
Hearn: Reaching Bitcoin capacity limits will kick users out of the system
“At worst, things break quite badly, but even at best, even if things don't break, some users won't be able to use Bitcoin, right? They will be kicked out of the system, effectively. There won't be enough capacity to handle them.”
Mike Hearn Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 3:22 a16z Podcast | Bitcoin's Growing Pains -- and Possibilities
Insight
Hearn: Western Bitcoin adoption suffers from poor messaging, not lack of utility
“If you're in the West and you have access to, you know, credit card payments and so on, it's not always clear why you would want to use Bitcoin, but that's not because there aren't good reasons, it's because we're not doing a good job of, like, telling people …”
Mike Hearn Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 14:52 a16z Podcast | Bitcoin's Growing Pains -- and Possibilities
Prediction Held up
Hearn: Bitcoin will hit its 1MB block size limit next year
“And we're now at more like half of that block size, and it, you know, as traffic is growing, it looks like we might start hitting that limit sometime next year.”
Mike Hearn Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 2:10 a16z Podcast | Bitcoin's Growing Pains -- and Possibilities
Opinion
Hearn: Developers have not fully utilized Bitcoin's scripting capabilities
“We've never really fully used the capabilities of even Bitcoin's fairly limited language.”
Mike Hearn Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 7:55 a16z Podcast | Bitcoin's Growing Pains -- and Possibilities
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hearn: M-Pesa succeeded by bypassing Western anti-money laundering requirements
“M-Pesa was partly successful because it sort of ignored all of the Western anti-money laundering requirements and so on. Like you can just have a SIM card and start sending money, right, with M-Pesa in Kenya. You don't need to have a passport and, you know, an…”
Mike Hearn Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 19:00 a16z Podcast | Bitcoin's Growing Pains -- and Possibilities
Assertion Supported
Hearn: Satoshi named Gavin Andresen successor before Core maintainership passed to Wladimir van der Laan
“So when Satoshi left, he nominated Gavin Anderson as the, as his successor. And Gavin was maintainer of Bitcoin Core for a while, and then he delegated that again to Vladimir Vandalan.”
Mike Hearn Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 2:27 a16z Podcast | Bitcoin's Growing Pains -- and Possibilities
Assertion Supported
Hearn: Satoshi omitted Bitcoin's scripting language from white paper and emails
“For a long time, you know, for a long time it wasn't very well known, because Satoshi's white paper didn't mention it, and he didn't talk about it in, you know, his mailing list post either.”
Mike Hearn Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 7:17 a16z Podcast | Bitcoin's Growing Pains -- and Possibilities
Insight
Hearn: Micro-tipping accelerates adoption by introducing users to spending Bitcoin
“Tipping has been really great for this as well, because, you know, people can receive a tip without even really expecting it, and then suddenly they feel like, hey, I've actually got some money, I could go down to a local cafe and buy myself a drink, and it's …”
Mike Hearn Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 15:19 a16z Podcast | Bitcoin's Growing Pains -- and Possibilities
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hearn: M-Pesa cannot support cross-border transactions, creating opportunity for Bitcoin
“The moment they want to trade across borders, systems like Impeza don't even work either. So there's a real niche, well, not even a niche, right? There's a real serious need for many people that Bitcoin can meet there.”
Mike Hearn Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 20:31 a16z Podcast | Bitcoin's Growing Pains -- and Possibilities
Assertion Supported
Hearn: Satoshi set Bitcoin's 1MB limit when blocks were under 10KB
“He imposed a maximum one megabyte block size, and as there's one block every 10 minutes on average, that's, you know, you can calculate a maximum transaction rate from that. And at the time he put it in, we were around, you know, less than 10 kilobytes per blo…”
Mike Hearn Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 1:55 a16z Podcast | Bitcoin's Growing Pains -- and Possibilities
Assertion Supported
Hearn: Lighthouse pledges stay under user control until target is met
“Lighthouse is a completely peer-to-peer and Decentralized approach. So you can actually pledge money to a project in such a way that it stays under your control until the moment that the project has raised the full amount.”
Mike Hearn Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 6:04 a16z Podcast | Bitcoin's Growing Pains -- and Possibilities

The other half of the tape: Mike Hearn's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 6 times in 4 episodes on the a16z Podcast. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Michael Copeland 3Sonal Chokshi 1Olaf Carlson-Wee 1Chris Dixon 1

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
0032642019episodesmentions
0242019episodes it came up in
000.821.542019episodesmentions per episode
2019 6 mentions in 4 episodes 2 per episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
a16z Podcast | Bitcoin's Growing Pains -- and Possibilities Jan 2, 2019 11m
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