What is in the video?
Ben Tyson, a creator who writes and talks about HEX economics, compiles clips of Richard Heart from interviews and streams. The video does not date them. Heart refers to hex.win, to Ethereum miners and to PulseChain as a chain still to come, so the clips were recorded before PulseChain launched in May 2023. Some figures in them, such as price and market cap, are from that time and are not repeated here.
Does it matter who wrote the code?
Asked by an interviewer about the largely unknown development team, Heart says the people shown on the website did not write the code that shipped and that the author is not public (at 0:18). In Heart’s view, what was built matters far more than who built it: a respectable identity proves little, while a statistical look at what a system actually does can expose a fraud. Bitcoin, Heart notes, works without anyone knowing who Satoshi is.
Verified, audited, no admin keys — what does the code say?
Heart’s argument rests on three points (at 1:49, at 10:06):
- The source is verified on Etherscan, so anyone can check that the published text compiles to the code on the chain.
- There are no admin keys, no proxy, no pause and no off switch.
- The project has three audits — one economics audit and two security audits.
Points 1 and 2 match the code. The HEX contract has no owner, no admin functions, no pause, no upgrade proxy and no self-destruct. Its inflation rate, penalties and stake limits are constants. The copy on PulseChain runs byte-for-byte the same deployed code. Every place where the contract creates new HEX is reached only through its public rules — there is no free-standing mint function.
Point 3 is only partly documented. Two CoinFabrik reports are public: the economics audit (October 2019) and the security audit (December 2019, no critical and no medium issues, three minor ones). hex.com also names a ChainSecurity audit, but no public report has been found. In one clip Heart says another audit is coming and is under NDA. Until it is published, it counts as announced, not verified. Details: HEX audits.
Why does Heart call HEX safer than Bitcoin?
According to Heart, the most dangerous bug in crypto is the inflation bug, which lets anyone mint coins out of thin air (at 3:37). Heart names Bitcoin — an incident in 2010 that was rolled back and a later bug fixed before anyone used it — and several other coins. In Heart’s account, such bugs come from code that mixes the wallet, networking and consensus without a written specification. HEX keeps its supply rules in a small, isolated contract that Ethereum upgrades cannot change. Heart compares this to a safe inside a safe: the outer chain would have to fail first (at 7:34).
What the HEX code confirms is the isolation and the fixed rules described above. The statements about bugs in other blockchains are Heart’s and were not checked by Cryptospecting.
In another clip Heart says that a later Ethereum gas change made the contract’s storage reads much more expensive. Because HEX cannot be changed, that cost became one reason to fork the whole chain into PulseChain (at 10:06).
What else is in the video?
- A heated debate with a Bitcoin supporter over decentralization, Bitcoin’s development process and whether Bitcoin’s rules have ever changed — with SegWit’s capacity increase brought up as an example (at 12:03).
- Open source: Heart says the code can be read and verified by anyone but is not licensed for forking (at 16:36). The licence terms were not reviewed here.
- A SIM-swap warning: Heart tells of an older HEX staker who lost a large sum when attackers took over the victim’s phone number, got into the cloud accounts and found the seed words stored there (at 17:49). The lesson matches the portal’s security advice: seed words never belong in a phone backup or any cloud storage.