MARTIN HUTCHINSON PREDICTS 2015 ‘DEMISE’ OF BITCOIN

Retired investment banker and former US Treasury adviser to Croatia Martin Hutchinson recently penned a hit piece in which he made clear two things. One, he does not understand how Bitcoin mining works and two, this lack of understanding leads him to believe that Bitcoin will fall flat on its face in 2015. In his article for the Reuters Breakingviews site, he uses outdated metrics as well as a clearly weak understanding of how cryptocurrency works to make this prophecy.
[Bitcoin] is controlled not by a state but by an underlying algorithm by which participants can ‘mine’ bitcoins through solving mathematical problems. […] As a reward, miners receive more bitcoins, distributed randomly.
No mention here of the finding of blocks and how that effects the payment. Indeed, a mining pool who finds a block receives the full 25 Bitcoins generated and then distributes it to the miners involved, a process that is not random at all. However, Hutchinson makes even more clear that his information is quite outdated in the following passage:

This post was published at Crypto Coins News on December 29, 2014.