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.
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Introducing Mike Hearn
For 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 Bitcoin
Wuckert 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 structure, but it’s not how he would have handled it.
Satoshi Nakamoto and Hearn’s interactions with him
Wuckert points out that, as time went on, Satoshi Nakamoto seemed to change from optimistic to slightly jaded and grumpy and no longer interested when he disappeared from the project. He wonders if Hearn, who had personal interactions with Bitcoin’s inventor, has any insight into his mindset.
Hearn reflects that it’s difficult to say what Satoshi’s real-life circumstances were. However, he seemed like someone interested in experimenting and discussing possibilities. Then, when the evangelical personalities showed up, he appeared to grow frustrated and understandably disappeared.
Wuckert points out that while many people view Nakamoto as a gold bug or Hayek fan, he sees him as interested in payments and novel uses for the technology. He even insinuated a bigger thing to come, and he wonders if Hearn might have any idea what it was. He replies that he never mentioned anything explicitly but was always happy to explain how Bitcoin could be used for other people’s ideas.
While he is no longer involved in Bitcoin and largely disconnected when he decided he was done, Hearn is aware of the broad outlines of what’s going on. For example, he knows what BCH and BSV are. However, he no longer follows Bitcoin closely.
The new horizon and what the next decade looks like
Now that they’ve covered the past, Wuckert wants to know what the future might look like from Hearn’s point of view. Where is this all going? What does the next decade look like?
Hearn answers without hesitation: LLMs and artificial intelligence (AI) are the big trends, and while they’re capable of great things, they will change how the internet works. Currently, content creators and search engines are incentivized by the potential to earn money from ads. However, if LLMs and AI agents search for people, those ads will no longer be served, so the incentive to create the content will not be there. As a result, AI apps, which depend on said content, will cease to be useful.
One potential solution is for AI agents to cut content creators in on the action when they use their content for an answer. Micropayments at scale would be required for this to work, and the web could revert to what it once was: basic text and images. Agents would gather this information, serve it up, and pay a tiny payment to the webmaster. In a sense, the internet would come full circle and return to its roots.
Hearn says he would be interested in integrating micropayments into HTTP. He mentions HTTP 402 and how it enables payments to access resources but how no standard protocol for online payments was ever officially implemented using it. If he worked on this, he’d integrate it with web servers and make it possible to pay them. Again, a scalable payment system would be required for this to be viable.
To hear more about Hearn’s thoughts on Bitcoin, internet payments, Ripple, CBDCs, and more, check out the livestream via this link.
Watch: Bitcoin Dev Culture and Tooling
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