Bitcoin is sitting 48 percent below its all-time high of $126,080, reached in October 2025, and that drop has drawn fresh criticism from some of the investment world's most prominent skeptics.
Jeremy Grantham, the billionaire co-founder of investment firm GMO, who predicted the 2008 financial crisis, appeared on CNBC's Squawk Box in late June to deliver a sharp verdict on the cryptocurrency. He called Bitcoin a "useless, speculative" asset that will "dwindle away, I suspect, not with a bang, but a whimper" over the coming decades. Warren Buffett has called Bitcoin "rat poison squared," and Buffett's late partner Charlie Munger held similar views.
According to a report by Yahoo Finance, one of Grantham's specific claims may not hold up to scrutiny. Grantham told CNBC, "All Bitcoin does is allow fraudsters to move money around." That argument has been challenged by recent data from Chainalysis, the leading blockchain analytics company. In its 2026 Crypto Crime Report, Chainalysis found that stablecoins now account for 84 percent of illicit on-chain volume, as criminals have moved away from Bitcoin's publicly searchable and permanent transaction ledger toward other digital assets.
The data suggests that Bitcoin's traceability has made it less attractive to bad actors, not more.
Grantham's other major argument centers on Bitcoin's price behavior. He pointed to the fact that Bitcoin's price collapsed after October 2025 even as the broader stock market held up. That observation is accurate. Bitcoin fell sharply while equities remained relatively stable, a divergence that skeptics have cited as evidence the asset has no connection to economic fundamentals.
Defenders of Bitcoin point to two structural features of the asset. The first is a hard cap: only 21 million Bitcoin will ever exist. The second is the regular halving of the mining reward, a programmed event that reduces the rate at which new Bitcoin enters circulation. Together, these features are designed to create conditions where long-term demand from buyers outpaces new supply from miners and sellers over time.
Those features do not guarantee price increases at any specific moment. They do not prevent the kind of 48 percent drawdown that has occurred since October 2025. What supporters argue is that these features bias the asset's long-term price direction upward, particularly when measured against fiat currencies that are subject to inflation.
The debate between Grantham and Bitcoin supporters reflects a divide that has persisted for years in financial markets. On one side are investors who view the asset as having no intrinsic value and no reliable use case. On the other are those who see its fixed supply and decentralized structure as a long-term store of value.
Neither side is likely to change the other's mind soon. Grantham, at 87, has decades of experience predicting major market bubbles, which gives his warnings weight with a significant portion of the investment community. Bitcoin, meanwhile, has survived multiple crashes of similar or greater magnitude and returned to new highs each time, which is the central counterargument its supporters continue to make.