Mike Hearn has been a senior software engineer at Google working on Google Maps, Google Earth and Gmail. In 2014 he left Google to fully focus on Bitcoin development. That is until the beginning of this year. In January Hearn wrote the blog post “The resolution of the bitcoin experiment”, in which he explains why he thinks that Bitcoin has failed. As a consequence the Bitcoin price immediately crashed by about 10%. Now, he works for the banking consortium R3 CEV, which works on distributed ledger solutions for financial institutions. The consortium was founded in September 2015 by Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Barclays, Credit Suisse, UBS and four more banks. As of now, it consists of 42 of the world’s biggest financial institutions. After his talk at this year’s START Summit I had the chance to do a short interview with him on Bitcoin, Ethereum and the blockchain.
NOTE: Towards the end of the video I wrongly use the word Ethereum. Ethereum is a distributed ledger company situated in the “crypto valley” in Zug, Switzerland. Their general purpose is to create something like an operating software on which blockchain applications can run, however, they also have a cryptocurrency called “Ether”, which was designed to be used by companies etc. running things on Ethereum to pay “Gas” fees to those who provide the computing power in the decentralized network. In the last question I obviously meant to refer to Ether.
Also, I am not sure if the difference between a decentralized app & a completely dehumanized company becomes clear since both might be classified as decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO). What I meant in the first case is something like Arcade City, basically an Uber 2.0, which isn’t run by a central authority, but by all those who participate in it (the legal framework of this is still quite unclear though). It’s almost a wet communist dream. However, you can still go a logical step further from there and completely dehumanize a company. Let’s imagine some Uber 3.0 in let’s say about 5 years. It could be a set of narrow AIs programmed to buy or lease self-driving cars according to certain criteria and offer driving prices according to certain criteria e.g. so that its profit equals zero. Once programmed, it could buy and offer economic services from and to humans, human-owned entities or other autonomous organizations, however, its decision-making processes would be completely dehumanized.