The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 11 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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.”
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 …”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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 …”
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.”
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…”