The issue, Hearn composed, was that after Satoshi Nakamoto vanished from the scene and 'handed over the reins' of Bitcoin to the developer Gavin Andresen, the latter also given access to the code to four other designers. Among them, Gregory Maxwell, challenged Hearn's proposition on the grounds that speeding up transaction speeds by increasing the size of the 'blocks' would indicate that only individuals (or more likely, big companies) with advanced hardware would be able to run the nodes that process deals.
As it turned out, the balance of opinion among the power players in the Bitcoin neighborhood (where ballot rights are based on the quantity of mining that you do) swung towards Maxwell's perspective though possibly not for the factors he had at first offered. It has actually been suggested that congestion in the system actually benefits existing miners, who can charge fees in order to process selected payments faster by shunting them to the front the line.
'I'm not too anxious about this issue,' says Dr Garrick Hileman of the University of Cambridge Centre for Option Finance. 'It would be suicidal for the Bitcoin community to not handle this one way or another. A stopgap procedure called Segregated Witness has already been executed, which will increase throughput briefly.' When I contact Mike Hearn to ask if the current intro of the substitute procedure has changed his viewpoint, he declines to offer an interview, picking to react with a quick email in which he explains that he does not 'seem like reviewing that stuff once again'.
Ethereum isn't digital cash per se, although it does comprise its own digital currency called Ether. Instead, it is a 'decentralised platform' that utilizes blockchain innovation to provide a versatile framework on which other applications can be constructed. Read This includes so-called 'clever agreements' that can be written or programmed and then left to autonomously perform themselves based on pre-determined requirements.
In theory, whole business could be run in the exact same way. In truth, that is what was expected to occur with the formation of the Decentralized Autonomous Organisation (DAO) in May of this year. Basically the DAO was to be a kind of unmanned venture capital fund, without any board of directors, that was developed on Ethereum to instantly make financial investments according to guidelines concurred by its backers.