iStock/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) — A Bitcoin developer has stepped away from the online currency.
Mike Hearn, a developer for the online currency for five years, said that the “Bitcoin experiment” had “failed” in a blog post on Medium.
According to Hearn, “The fundamentals are broken and whatever happens to the price in the short term, the long term trend should probably be downwards.”
He said he would no longer participate in developing for Bitcoin and he had sold all his coins.
Bitcoin is a digital currency and an online payment system invented by “Satoshi Nakamoto” in 2008 whose identity remains unknown. The peer-to-peer transaction method of Bitcoin is meant to be used to remove an intermediary.
“What was meant to be a new, decentralised form of money that lacked ‘systemically important institutions’ and ‘too big to fail’ has become something even worse: a system completely controlled by just a handful of people,” he wrote in the blog post. “Worse still, the network is on the brink of technical collapse. The mechanisms that should have prevented this outcome have broken down, and as a result there’s no longer much reason to think Bitcoin can actually be better than the existing financial system.”
Hearn left a job at Google two years ago to work for Bitcoin and now, according to the New York Times, he will work for R3 “developing Bitcoin-like networks for banks.”
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