On Friday, Bitcoin dropped by over 10% after Mike Hearn, one of the cryptocurrency’s lead developers wrote in a blog post he was ending all involvement with it and selling all remaining holdings he had because it failed.

Hearn, one of 5 senior developers who spent over five years working on the currency that is web based, said he no longer would take part in its development.

He wrote that despite knowing bitcoin might fail the whole time, the conclusion that is now inescapable that it actually has failed saddens him.

With Gavin Andresen, who bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto had chosen to be his successor after stepping down in 2011, Hearn for months has been locked in a bitter battle with developers over if the blocks in which the transaction of bitcoin are processed need to be enlarged.

Each block at this time has the capacity of 1 MB, which Hearn said is an artificial capacity cap that allows a maximum of only three payments to be processed each second.

This past August, Hearn along with Andresen released another version of the existing Bitcoin XT software, which would increase its size to 8 MBs, allowing for as many as 24 transaction per second to be processed.

While that still is just a fraction of the more than 20,000 that Visa is able to process, it would go up each year so bitcoin could grow on a continual basis.

However, the new software was not adopted by mining computers, which secure the bitcoin network, of which the majority are inside China.

Hearn said that the bitcoin network would run out of its capacity soon due to the volume of its transactions increasing. When that takes place, said Hearn, the network would become less reliable with the payments not able to be processed and it would become vulnerable to fraud.

Hearn believes that the bitcoin community failed in the governance of the code for the cryptocurrency.

Hearn wrote that what had been designed to be a new and decentralized type of money that lacked systemically important institutions that were too large to fail, has now become even worse: a system controlled completely by only a few people.

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