One of Bitcoin’s oldest developers quit the project this week, citing irreconcilable differences with the software team in charge of the project. In and of itself, that’s not unusual. But most developers don’t quit projects with a public declaration of failure and a lengthy discussion of why, exactly, they believe a project is doomed. Mike Hearn, however, has done just that.

In a recent blog post, Hearn lays out the current situation with Bitcoin and why he believes the experiment can’t recover. According to Hearn, what began as an idealistic attempt to create, in the words of Sakashi Nakamoto, “A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” has now become “a system completely controlled by just a handful of people.”

Hearn continues:

“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.”