• Eswar Prasad, senior professor of international trade policy at Cornell University, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” earlier this month: “Bitcoin itself may not last that much longer.”
• Bitcoin’s price has been highly volatile over the last few years and in the last month the price of a bitcoin has fallen from around $58,000 to less than $48,000.
• While there used to be just a few cryptocurrencies, today there are hundreds and some of them are more useful and more environmentally-friendly than bitcoin.

The future of bitcoin is anyone’s guess, but one academic has warned that the world’s most popular cryptocurrency could fade out in the near future.

Eswar Prasad, senior professor of international trade policy at Cornell University, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” earlier this month: “Bitcoin itself may not last that much longer.”

Bitcoin’s price has been highly volatile over the last few years and in the last month the price of one coin has fallen from around $58,000 to less than $46,000. At 10:15 a.m. ET on Friday, the price of a bitcoin was $45,637.

While there used to be just a few cryptocurrencies, today there are hundreds and some of them are more useful and more environmentally-friendly than bitcoin.

Blockchain is the underlying technology behind most cryptocurrencies. It’s essentially a digital ledger of virtual currency transactions which is distributed across a global network of computers.

“Bitcoin’s use of the blockchain technology is not very efficient,” said Prasad, who is the author of “The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution is Transforming Currencies and Finance.”…read more.