A Nobel Prize winner has warned that Bitcoin will be worthless within the next 10 years.
The cryptocurrency boom could soon be over, with one industry expert warning that he thinks Bitcoin might eventually be worthless. After the NFT boom and collapse of 2021, it's not hard to see crypto going the same way.
There's been a post-election boom in Bitcoin, with the world's first decentralized cryptocurrency hitting record highs since Donald Trump trounced Kamala Harris in November 2024. Then again, with Trump being the first US President to buy goods using crypto, we should've seen this coming. There's also the fact that the POTUS and First Lady have released their own meme coins, with both Donald and Melania Trump coming under fire and some losing thousands for investing in them. Trump has made millions off the back of his crypto ventures, but according to Nobel Laurette Eugene Fama, Bitcoin will soon be 'worthless'. The so-called 'Father of Modern Finance' has some stark warnings, suggesting that the cryptocurrency has no real value, is unsuitable for buying and selling, and can't find a place in normalized banking systems.
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Fama points out how Bitcoin's fluctuating prices make it unstable, with many companies (logically) refusing to accept it as payment. Whereas fiat currencies have government support, Bitcoin doesn't have the backing of a central authority.
Like the previous NFT bubble, Fama suggests that if the demand for Bitcoin vanishes, so does its pricing.
Speaking to the Capitalisn’t podcast with Luigi Zingales and Bethany McLean, Fama explained: "Cryptocurrencies are such a puzzle because they violate all the rules of a medium of exchange.
"They don’t have a stable real value. You know, they have highly variable real value. That kind of medium of exchange is not supposed to survive."
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Zingales went on to add: "The problem with all the cryptos is, in order to create some trust in the system, you basically bound the supply, and once you bound the supply, the price is driven entirely by demand."
The fixed supply and wavering demand apparently make Bitcoin unsuitable to be classed as a long-term currency.
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When Zingales pushed Fama on the future of Bitcoin, and whether it would eventually dip to zero he mused: "I would say it’s close to one."
Still, he said that 'the distribution has long tails', suggesting that it's hard to predict when, how, and if a collapse will happen.
As for Fama, he actually hopes Bitcoin will go bump, hopefully proving his work on efficient capital markets: "I’m hoping it will bust, because if it doesn’t, you have to start all over with monetary theory."
No fan of Bitcoin, Fama concludes that for it to stay around long-term, economists will have to overhaul what they think about money and markets completely. Bitcoin hit a record high of $109,114.88 in January 2025, but with prices already slumping due to the market responding to US tariffs, the cracks could already be showing.