BLOCKCHAIN
BLOCKCHAIN
BLOCKCHAIN
Warren Buffett says bitcoin attracts charlatans, calling it ‘delusional’
Troubled Tesla Inc. founder Elon Musk may love bitcoin, but the sentiment isn’t shared by famed investor Warren Buffett who has called the cryptocurrency “delusional.”
The latest missive from Buffett (pictured), who has never been a bitcoin fan, came via an interview with CNBC where he said, among other things, that “bitcoin has no unique value at all” and that “it doesn’t produce anything. You can stare at it all day and no little bitcoins come out. It’s a delusion basically.”
Moreover, Buffett added, “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.”
On bitcoin’s precipitous fall from a peak of near $20,000 in late 2017, Buffett said, “I’m really sorry it happens because people get there hopes up that something like that is going to change their lives…. I’m sympathetic to people that own it,” he told CNBC.
Conversely, Buffet is a fan of blockchain, the underlying distributed ledger that powers bitcoin. “It’s a very ingenious thing to figure out how to have a limited supply and make it harder and more expensive to create,” she said.
The news comes as bitcoin itself is experiencing another roller coaster ride of price surges and declines. Over the weekend bitcoin hit a high of $4,157.90 at 2 a.m. EST Sunday before dropping to $3,767.37 as of 8:30 p.m. EST the same day.
As of 10:30 p.m. EST Monday bitcoin was trading at $3,830.03, a slight recovery but indicative of what may be the end of a 13-month bear run from around Feb. 7.
The news that Coinbase Inc. was adding support for Ripple XRP buoyed cryptocurrency markets across the board, XRP leading with nearly a 10 percent spike.
The bounce could have been higher, but investors were taking a wait-and-see approach as a hard fork of Ethereum, scheduled to happen sometime Monday, is yet to have happened as of now. Formally, the hard fork and split of Ethereum is due to take place once the cryptocurrency hits block 7,280,000, which will likely occur in the next 24 hours.
Photo: 140989741@N04/Flickr
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