Jeremy Grantham’s latest CNBC comments are a perfect example of what happens when traditional finance tries to judge Bitcoin using an old framework.
Had these comments been about crypto, I would have nodded along. Much of that market has proved to be speculative and altcoin season is not coming back.
This was not a discussion about the crypto casino. He was speaking in front of a Bitcoin chart, while the segment drifted between 'crypto' and Bitcoin as though they were the same thing, which tells you how little precision sat behind the critique.
Bitcoin deserves a more serious discussion than recycled talking points about crooks, dividends and supermarket payments.
He called it a 'useless speculative mechanism' and said it would 'dwindle away' over decades, 'not with a bang but a whimper.'
He asked why people do not use it to buy dinner or pay at the supermarket.
Then came the line:
“What it does is allows crooks to move money around without leaving a trace.”
That is not dismissive… it’s wrong.
It is not a stock, a company, or a bond. It does not have earnings, dividends, cash flow, a management team, or a board of directors, because it was not designed to be valued like those things.
It is a decentralised monetary network with:
- no CEO
- no central bank
- no political control
- no bailouts
- no off switch
- a fixed 21 million supply that cannot be inflated on demand.
The 'without leaving a trace' claim really misunderstands the system.
Bitcoin is a public ledger and every base layer transaction is recorded. It is far more traceable than cash, which is why law enforcement, analytics firms and exchanges have spent years building tools around that transparency.
The 'people don’t buy dinner with it' argument is also wrong and lazy. Gold is not judged by how often it is used at the supermarket.
Bitcoin allows people to store and transfer value across borders, outside a system suffering from inflation, surveillance, debanking, capital controls and political discretion.
Then there is proof of work, which Grantham dismissed as 'proof of unnecessary work.'
That 'work' is what secures the network. It is what makes Bitcoin expensive to attack, impossible to rewrite and different from the thousands of tokens that can be changed, paused, printed or controlled by insiders.
That is a stock market framework being applied to an open monetary protocol.
Bitcoin has already survived bans, crashes, exchange failures, media attacks, regulatory assaults, energy panic, criminality narratives and repeated predictions of its death. That is not dwindling away.
Grantham is not watching Bitcoin disappear, he is watching the old framework fail to explain it.
So if the price worries you, remember what this actually is...
A 17 year old monetary network separating money from state and challenging some of the oldest assumptions in finance.
We are still early!
Full article:
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2026/06/26/billionaire-investor-jeremy-grantham-says-bitcoin-will-dwindle-away-with-a-whimper.html
Had these comments been about crypto, I would have nodded along. Much of that market has proved to be speculative and altcoin season is not coming back.
This was not a discussion about the crypto casino. He was speaking in front of a Bitcoin chart, while the segment drifted between 'crypto' and Bitcoin as though they were the same thing, which tells you how little precision sat behind the critique.
Bitcoin deserves a more serious discussion than recycled talking points about crooks, dividends and supermarket payments.
He called it a 'useless speculative mechanism' and said it would 'dwindle away' over decades, 'not with a bang but a whimper.'
He asked why people do not use it to buy dinner or pay at the supermarket.
Then came the line:
“What it does is allows crooks to move money around without leaving a trace.”
That is not dismissive… it’s wrong.
It is not a stock, a company, or a bond. It does not have earnings, dividends, cash flow, a management team, or a board of directors, because it was not designed to be valued like those things.
It is a decentralised monetary network with:
- no CEO
- no central bank
- no political control
- no bailouts
- no off switch
- a fixed 21 million supply that cannot be inflated on demand.
The 'without leaving a trace' claim really misunderstands the system.
Bitcoin is a public ledger and every base layer transaction is recorded. It is far more traceable than cash, which is why law enforcement, analytics firms and exchanges have spent years building tools around that transparency.
The 'people don’t buy dinner with it' argument is also wrong and lazy. Gold is not judged by how often it is used at the supermarket.
Bitcoin allows people to store and transfer value across borders, outside a system suffering from inflation, surveillance, debanking, capital controls and political discretion.
Then there is proof of work, which Grantham dismissed as 'proof of unnecessary work.'
That 'work' is what secures the network. It is what makes Bitcoin expensive to attack, impossible to rewrite and different from the thousands of tokens that can be changed, paused, printed or controlled by insiders.
That is a stock market framework being applied to an open monetary protocol.
Bitcoin has already survived bans, crashes, exchange failures, media attacks, regulatory assaults, energy panic, criminality narratives and repeated predictions of its death. That is not dwindling away.
Grantham is not watching Bitcoin disappear, he is watching the old framework fail to explain it.
So if the price worries you, remember what this actually is...
A 17 year old monetary network separating money from state and challenging some of the oldest assumptions in finance.
We are still early!
Full article:
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2026/06/26/billionaire-investor-jeremy-grantham-says-bitcoin-will-dwindle-away-with-a-whimper.html
65❤️11🤙1
