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Author: Admin | 2025-04-27
Homepage > News > Business > Bitcoin retrospective and focus on the Internet’s future This week, the CoinGeek Weekly Livestream welcomed a special guest, Mike Hearn, to talk about Bitcoin, payments, and the future of the Internet. Hearn was an early Bitcoin developer who personally interacted with Satoshi Nakamoto. Enjoy the insightful conversation between Hearn and Kurt Wuckert Jr. via the link below. title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen="">Introducing Mike HearnFor Bitcoin OG’s, Mike Hearn needs no introduction. However, for those who may not be familiar with him, Wuckert asks him to introduce himself. Hearn explains he got involved with Bitcoin in 2009 due to a longstanding interest in Internet money. After starting a Yahoo group about the subject, he discovered Ripple, which led him to Bitcoin.Around this time, Hearn worked for Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL), debugging and fixing things when they broke. He says he eventually got tired of that and got involved with Gmail in bot detection and security. This is when he started working on Bitcoin on the side. While he eventually left the project and went to work for Corda on R3, he took some of what he had learned in Bitcoin and applied it in novel ways. These days, he runs his own software company and works part-time as a researcher.Hal Finney, Gavin Andresen, and the early days of BitcoinWuckert asks Hearn about Hal Finney and his interactions with him. Hearn says the legendary cypherpunk had created his own Internet money, which differed from Bitcoin. He had emailed Finney before Bitcoin existed and talked to him a few times on forums and over the Internet in the early days. However, he never met him in person.Wuckert mentions how some of Hearn’s questions to Satoshi Nakamoto were hugely insightful. He asks him if, looking back now, his view on the tech has changed. Hearn says the tech is still interesting, but he now has a greater appreciation for the social side of things. Solving the computer science problems is not enough. If he could go back, he would push back harder against some of the ideas he disagreed with. He also would not go with the term ‘Bitcoin Core.’ He also believes something like the Bitcoin Foundation could have worked out if handled differently.Wuckert believes Gavin Andresen was the wrong personality type to be given the position he was. While he’s a friendly and likeable guy, he was too easy to bully and push around. He wonders if things could have turned out differently if another person had been in charge. “It’s difficult to say,” Hearn responds, saying he understands why Andresen added multiple people to the repository without much
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