By
Tolu Ajiboye
April 23rd, 2024
Warren Buffett, chairman and CEO of investment conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway, began a week taking a fresh dig at Bitcoin.
On the heels of his annual letter to clients, the world’s most famous investor told CNBC on Monday that Bitcoin, No. 1 digital currency has no unique value at all, referring to it as “a delusion.”
“Bitcoin has no unique value at all, it doesn’t produce anything. It’s a delusion basically,” said Mr. Buffett.
The Berkshire Hathaway CEO said he is sympathetic to optimists who bought the world’s largest cryptocurrency in hopes that “it would change their lives.” It is true though that Bitcoin has lost more than 80 percent of its value since reaching a high near $20,000 at the end of 2017. The cryptocurrency was trading near $3,847 at the time of writing, according to CoinMarketCap.
“It attracts charlatans,” continuedMr. Buffett. “If you do something phony by going out and selling yo-yos or something, there’s no money in it — but when you get into Wall Street, there’s huge money.”
Buffett has been a critic of Bitcoin for years already, and it seems he didn’t change his mind on Bitcoin and the cryptocurrency space yet.
Who Knows Where We Will Be Next Year
Buffett did say something nice on Bitcoin and blockchain though. He said:
“Bitcoin is ingenious and blockchain is important… but Bitcoin doesn’t produce anything. You can stare at it all day and no little Bitcoins come out.
Who knows where we will be next year. But I’m really sorry this happens, because people get their hopes up that something like that is going to change their lives.
It’s very ingenious to figure out how to have a limited supply, but they say blockchain doesn’t depend on Bitcoin. JP is even making their own, matched to the dollar.”
Berkshire Hathaway vice chairman Charlie Munger has also weighed in on Bitcoin, commenting on Buffett’s criticism to crypto with his own negative opinion of the crypto market: “Someone else is trading turds and you decide I can’t be left out.”
In October 2018, Berkshire Hathaway invested around $600 million in two fintech payment firms focused on emerging markets.
Last year, a self-proclaimed disciple of both Buffett and Munger, Chamath Palihapitiya, noted he believed that the two skeptics were wrong about the leading crypto, stating that “technology is not in [Buffet’s] circle of competence.”
Buffet is well known as Bitcoin shamer. Only last May, he referred to Bitcoin as “rat poison squared,” noting that it was a “nonproductive asset.”
Similarly, he predicted that Bitcoin would come to “a bad ending” in January 2018, and emphasized that Berkshire would not hold a position in Bitcoin futures.
It All Began Back in 2014
It all began already 2014 when Warren Buffett, investor and Berkshire Hathaway CEO, made an interview with CNBC on 14th March 2014. He warned investors to stay away from Bitcoin and other digital currencies “It is a mirage basically”, he insisted.
The biggest obstacle for Bitcoin is in its not very good rates history, because predictable earnings are usually in favor of investors as Warren Buffett. But this approach doesn’t work really well. For example, Buffet is famous for avoiding tech stocks, even those as promising as Facebook. So sometimes new and provocative ideas are the shortest way to financial success and may be it is too early to write Bitcoin off.
Meanwhile, Buffet is not the only one who expressed his bearish attitude towards BTC. We all remember last year when J.P. Morgan Chief Executive Jamie Dimon has publicly admitted that he regrets calling Bitcoin a ‘fraud’. Although Dimon has changed his mind about Bitcoin and blockchain technology, the CEO added that he still is not interested in the cryptocurrency at all.