The lead developer for Bitcoin, a digital currency that created waves on the Internet, quit the company on Friday, saying the product has failed. Mike Hearn’s exit led to a 10% slide in the value of the Bitcoin, which is an encrypted form of online money that can be traded, exchanged and used to make payments. Hearn, one of five developers who worked on the currency since 2011, said he has come to “the inescapable conclusion” that there is no future for Bitcoin, Reuters reported.

Hearn was chosen by Bitcoin’s enigmatic creator Satoshi Nakamoto to succeed him when he stepped down in 2011. Over the last few months, Hearn and the other developers have been engaged in a battle over enlarging the “blocks” through which Bitcoin is traded. According to Hearn, these 1-megabyte blocks can only handle up to three payments per second, but if made bigger could increase Bitcoin's capacity to 24 transactions a minute. In comparison, credit card giant Visa can process 20,000 payments a minute.

Hearn claims resistance to increasing these blocks means that the Bitcoin network will soon run out of capacity. Subsequently, the network will become unreliable and vulnerable to frauds, leading to the eventual downfall of the digital currency. "What was meant to be a new, decentralised form of money that lacked 'systemically important institutions’… has become something even worse: a system completely controlled by just a handful of people," he said in a post on Medium.