According to Bitcoin.com co-founder and CTO Emil Oldenburg, Bitcoin is “useless” and has no future as a tradeable currency, citing high transaction fees and long lead times. In an interview with Swedish tech site Breakit, Oldenburg said that he had sold all of his Bitcoin and switched to Bitcoin Cash, a hard fork of Bitcoin created in August 2017.

Oldenburg justifies his actions, saying:

“An investment in Bitcoin right now I would say is the most risky investment one can make. It is extremely high-risk. I’ve actually sold all of my Bitcoins recently and switched to Bitcoin Cash.”

Despite the fact that Oldenburg’s company is in fact a Bitcoin wallet, the CTO says that he has become disenchanted with Bitcoin due to its high transaction fees and slow confirmation time, saying Bitcoin’s current performance is “completely unreasonable.” Increased transaction speed and lower costs are the main features supporters of Bitcoin Cash point to when comparing the two coins.

Based on analysis, Bitcoin transaction fees have indeed increased from an average of 20 cents to about $15 over the course of 2017.

Addressing the apparent conflict of interest between his company and his personal views, Oldenburg explained that the wallet is also moving away from Bitcoin to focus on Bitcoin Cash:

“We’ve actually stopped developing new services for the old Bitcoin network now and are focusing mostly on [developing for] Bitcoin Cash. Where it costs only 10 öre [$0.12] to send [BCH] and there’s no waiting. The only backside is that it requires larger hard drives, but that’s not a problem for most people.”

Oldenburg further argued that the problems with Bitcoin transactions emerge during the recording of the transactions on the Blockchain. He claimed that the bottleneck on the Blockchain results in a highly risky and illiquid digital currency:

“There's only a limited amount of transactions per second you can make in the Bitcoin network, which in part depends on the ‘block size’ of the memory that store the transactions on the Blockchain. This bottleneck makes for a highly risky and illiquid cryptocurrency…the old Bitcoin network is as good as unusable.”

The price of Bitcoin, however, continues to grow and has already breached the $20,000 level this week. It is currently trading at around $18,000 as of press time.