Warren Buffett, billionaire and a notorious bitcoin bear, again hit at cryptocurrencies during the 2018 Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholder meeting on Saturday, May 5, referring to the digital currencies as “rat poison squared.
On the contrary, younger generation of tech billionaires like Jack Dorsey, Twitter CEO Peter Thiel, PayPal co-founder and Tim Draper, tech venture capitalist are unmoved in their conviction that bitcoin is here to stay and will displace all other currencies.
The billionaire reiterated his earlier warning that “cryptocurrencies will come to bad endings,” which businessam also reported. “If you had bought gold at the time of Christ and you figure the compound rate on it, it’s a couple tenths of a percent.”
Buffett previously said buying crypto isn’t really investing, but is merely speculative gambling, according to CNN. He said unlike real estate or company stocks, virtual currencies have no real value and only attract “charlatans.”‘
“If you buy something like bitcoin or some cryptocurrency, you don’t really have anything that has produced anything,” said Buffett, 87. “You’re just hoping the next guy pays more.”
In his recent comment on the digital currencies, Buffett stepped further by calling bitcoin “rat poison squared,” according to CNBC reporter Becky Quick, who live-tweeted the Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholder meeting.
.@WarrenBuffett on bitcoin just now: “it’s probably rat poison squared.” #brk2018
— Becky Quick (@BeckyQuick) May 5, 2018
Buffett’s longtime lieutenant, billionaire Charlie Munger, joined the bitcoin bashing, comparing the top cryptocurrency by market cap to turds being traded by people with dementia.
“I like cryptocurrency even less than Warren does … to me it’s just dementia,” Munger, 94, reportedly said. And a bitcoin trading desk is “like somebody else is trading turds and you’re being left out.”
Charlie Munger: “I like cryptocurrency even less than Warren does … to me it’s just dementia.” And a bitcoin trading desk is “like somebody else is trading turds and you’re being left out.”
— Becky Quick (@BeckyQuick) May 5, 2018
While Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger remain avowed crypto sceptics, Draper, PayPal co-founder is so confident in the future of crypto that he has set a $250,000 bitcoin price target for 2022, as CCN has reported.
Draper, an early investor in Skype, Tesla, and Hotmail, says bitcoin will be bigger than all three combined because it’s a revolution that’s bigger than the Internet.
“This is bigger than the internet,” Draper said. “It’s bigger than the Iron Age, the Renaissance. It’s bigger than the Industrial Revolution. This affects the entire world and it’s going to be affected in a faster and more prevalent way than you ever imagined.”
