Renowned billionaire investor Jeremy Grantham has delivered a harsh assessment of Bitcoin's value as an asset.
On June 26 (local time), Grantham appeared on CNBC's "Squawk Box" and stated, "Bitcoin is a useless, speculative asset," adding, "I expect it to fade away over the coming years or decades."
Quoting a line from T.S. Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men," he remarked that Bitcoin would not end with a "bang" but with a "whimper."
He pointed out that Bitcoin has failed to prove its utility in the real economy.
"Bitcoin can be cut in half for no reason at all in a perfectly solid economic environment," he added. "People don't use it to buy dinner or pay at the supermarket; they don't use it for any real transactions. It's just used by crooks for money laundering."
Grantham is a co-founder of the Boston-based asset management firm GMO and gained fame in financial markets for predicting the 2000 dot-com bubble burst and the 2008 global financial crisis.
This assessment comes as the prices of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies continue to decline.
According to Business Insider on this day, the price of Bitcoin is currently trading below 59,200 dollars (approximately 90 million won).
This figure represents a 30 percent drop this year alone and a 53 percent decline from its peak of 126,000 dollars in October of last year.
Ethereum, which has the second-highest trading volume after Bitcoin, has seen its price fall by 48 percent this year.