In an exclusive interview with Yahoo Finance in Omaha, Neb., leading up to Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder meeting, which will be held om May 5, Buffett laid out his latest thinking on cryptocurrency investing. He nailed it.
“There’s two kinds of items that people buy
and think they’re investing,” he says. “One really is investing and the other isn’t.” Bitcoin, he says, isn’t.
“If you buy something like a farm, an apartment house, or an interest in a business… You can do that on a private basis… And it’s a perfectly satisfactory investment. You look at the investment itself to deliver the return to you. Now, if you buy something like bitcoin or some cryptocurrency, you don’t really have anything that has produced anything. You’re just hoping the next guy pays more.”
When you buy cryptocurrency, Buffett continues, “You aren’t investing when you do that. You’re speculating. There’s nothing wrong with it. If you wanna gamble somebody else will come along and pay more money tomorrow, that’s one kind of game. That is not investing.”
Buffett's point is that the assets he lists such as a farm, an apartment house, etc., generate income. Bitcoin does not.
I would add there is another type of asset people hold and that is money. As Ludwig von Mises taught us, money is the most liquid good and people hold because of this liquidity. They know they can instantly exchange it, at a fairly stable price, nearly anywhere for goods and services.
This is where Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies fail in the money category. They are from an instrument at present that can be exchanged for any good or service and they are far from stable in price. Many people who have purchased Bitcoin over the last 6 months have lost as much as 50% of their purchasing power. That is not a stable asset, not even when compared to the U.S. dollar which is run by the Federal Reserve in crony reckless fashion.
Moreover, the idea of a world where a cryptocurrency is the world's medium of exchange is a frightening notion. It is quite simply a remarkable way for government to track all transactions and prohibit transactions in specific books and other goods that it doesn't want individuals to buy.
The idea that the government can't track Bitcoin is a delusion view held by Bitcoin fanboys.
The Intercept recently reported:
Classified documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden show that the National Security Agency indeed worked urgently to target bitcoin users around the world — and wielded at least one mysterious source of information to “help track down senders and receivers of Bitcoins,” according to a top-secret passage in an internal NSA report dating to March 2013. The data source appears to have leveraged the NSA’s ability to harvest and analyze raw, global internet traffic while also exploiting an unnamed software program that purported to offer anonymity to users, according to other documents.
Although the agency was interested in surveilling some competing cryptocurrencies, “Bitcoin is #1 priority,” a March 15, 2013 internal NSA report stated.-Robert Wenzel
(via Yahoo)
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