According to Aksakov, bitcoin may plunge all the way down to $300 per coin before the end of this year.
"It is unlikely [bitcoin] will rise to the $20,000 mark again, unless the Americans hold it there artificially," Aksakov said. "It can plunge to $300 before the end of this year."
Commenting on the world's most popular cryptocurrency, Aksakov said he shares the sentiment that bitcoin is a project of Western intelligence services.
"I think it is their project — American intelligence services. They seek to support it with various means," he said.
Earlier in January, Natalia Kasperskaya, co-founder of the Russian computer security company Kaspersky Lab, said that bitcoin was designed to provide financing for US and British intelligence activities around the world.
"Bitcoin is a project of American intelligence agencies, which was designed to provide quick funding for US, British and Canadian intelligence activities in different countries. [The technology] is 'privatized,' just like the internet, GPS and TOR. In fact, it is dollar 2.0. Its rate is controlled by the owners of exchanges," she said in a presentation published on Russian social media.
In the same presentation, she said that Satoshi Nakamoto, the alleged creator of bitcoin, is actually a pseudonym for a group of American cryptographers.
At the end of 2017, bitcoin hit a high of $20,000 per coin, but plunged to $6,000 in February over talks of possible government crackdowns on the cryptocurrency in South Korea and around the world.
As of February 15, bitcoin was trading at $10,134, according to the Coindesk website.
