In an interview with CNBC on Monday (February 25th), billionaire investor Warren Buffett, the Chairman and CEO of American multinational conglomerate holding company Berkshire Hathaway, called Bitcoin “a delusion” that “attracts charlatans.”
In today’s interview on Squawk Box, CNBC’s morning news and talk program, the world’s third richest person (according to Forbes’ “The World's Billionaires” list for 2018) was asked about his latest thoughts on Bitcoin (BTC) by co-anchor Becky Quick.
Buffett, who along with J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon and Economics Professor Nouriel Roubini, is famous for being one of the harshest critics of Bitcoin, explained that he had not changed his position on Bitcoin:
“Bitcoin, it's ingenious, and blockchain is important, but Bitcoin has no unique value at all. It doesn't produce anything. You can stare at it all day and no little bitcoins come out or anything like that. It's a delusion, basically.”
Quick then made a joke, saying that going from calling Bitcoin “rat poison squared” to “a delusion” seemed like “a kind of upgrade.”
“Well, who knows where we'll be next year. I'm really sorry it happens because people get their hopes up that something like that is going to change their lives. It was a very ingenious thing to figure out how to have a limited supply and make it more expensive to create as you go along, but… blockchain does not depend on Bitcoin, and J.P. Morgan is creating their own JPM [Coin] and it'll be worth a dollar.”
According to CNBC’s report, Warren Buffett also said:
“It attracts charlatans. 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.”
Warren Buffet’s use of the word “charlatan” to refer to Bitcoin advocates is interesting because just two days earlier Bitcoin bull Max Keiser had called Buffett “an unmitigated fraud and charlatan reliant entirely on tax-payer bailouts and accounting tricks.”
Over on Twitter, here were a few of the reactions from some prominent members of the crypto community:
Warren Buffett just said “Bitcoin is ingenious…but Bitcoin has no unique value at all. It doesn’t produce anything. You can stare at it all day & no Bitcoins come out or anything.”
REMINDER: Buffett has sat on $100+ billion of cash for last year and a half that has same issues
— Pomp 🌪 (@APompliano) February 25, 2019
Buffet never liked assets without a steady cash flow. He doesn’t like gold either. Time will tell if he is right or wrong.
— Gabor Gurbacs (@gaborgurbacs) February 25, 2019
Buffet on CNBC: “Blockchain is important but bitcoin has no unique value” I'm perplexed by :
1. Why Buffet would comment on something he knows nothing about
2. Why CNBC would ask him about something he knows nothing about
3. Why anyone in Crypto careshttps://t.co/vGKdNhOQsx
— Lou Kerner (@loukerner) February 25, 2019
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