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91 year old billionaire Charlie Munger has referred to Bitcoin as "rat poison". His friend, 84 year old Warren Buffett has said Bitcoin is "not a currency" and
by Ologn 11y ago
91 year old billionaire Charlie Munger has referred to Bitcoin as "rat poison". His friend, 84 year old Warren Buffett has said Bitcoin is "not a currency" and advised people to "stay away from it".
Now you can ascribe this to them being old fuddy duddies who "just don't get it". You can also ascribe this to the wisdom of people who lived through the Great Depression, World War II etc. and have seen every scam and snake oil pitch under the sun.
Which is exactly what Bitcoins are. They are worthless, they have no value. They're not only a scam, they're a scam that should be obvious on the face of it, like subprime real estate, or a Pets.com IPO. People talk about a Silicon Valley bubble - nothing is more indicative of a bubble than Bitcoins. These guys may not know the specifics of blockchain algorithms, but from decades of hard experience they can distinguish value from non-value, and Bitcoins have no value.
I can't think of a commodity it makes less sense to hold onto than a Bitcoin. Gold has value, as do other precious metals, oil has value - Bitcoins have no value. The only comparison I've seen made to Bitcoins is fiat money, but it would take too long to fully explain why Bitcoins don't have the value of a US dollar in a post here.
I was warning people of this scam here when Bitcoin was over $460 ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6753545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6753545 ). It has since fallen to $290. It will be falling to $0.
For some laughs, read http://bitcoin.org/en/faq#why-do-bitcoins-have-value http://bitcoin.org/en/faq#why-do-bitcoins-have-value - "Bitcoins have value because they are useful as a form of money. Bitcoin has the characteristics of money (durability, portability, fungibility, scarcity, divisibility, and recognizability) based on the properties of mathematics rather than relying on physical properties (like gold and silver) or trust in central authorities (like fiat currencies)."
What? Commodities which already have value(!) become currencies because they have "durability, portability, fungibility, scarcity, divisibility, and recognizability". Gold has all of those properties so it has made a good currency through history - but even if it had none of those properties, it derives its value from it being a commodity with useful physical traits - like the ability to fill a tooth, or conduct electricity, and so forth. Bitcoins have no such traits - they have the traits which would make a commodity with value a good currency, but it has no inherit value as a commodity!
Witness all the angels and VC's who sing the high holy praises of this scam. Are they just complete fools who have no understanding of the economics they claim to have expertise in, or are they just scammers trying to fleece suckers out there? I don't know the answer to this, but at the end of the day, all the VC's and seeders and angels on Twitter etc. who support this Bitcoin scam are either fools or thieves. Keynes said markets can remain irrational longer than he could remain solvent, but it's inevitable that Bitcoins price will go to $0. Since my first statement of this here, Bitcoin has gone from $460 to its present $290. It will inevitably go to $0, no matter how many of the scammers downvote this post so people won't see it. Because no matter what anyone says, the market cap of the $5 trillion worth of gold mined will never change more than an order of magnitude (barring some amazing chemical technological advance). Whereas lack of doubt is all that is keeping Bitcoin's $4 billion market cap from going to $0. From it's scammy beginnings (the anonymous "Satoshi"), to all the legal problems and scams of Mt. Gox, Butterfly Labs etc., it's only a matter of time before this Ponzi scheme comes to an end. More instructive than that is all the existing VC's, seeders, angels etc. who are vocal in their support of this scam - that's what you should really remember.
- deadmik3 11y agoWorks pretty fine for me when I buy stuff with it, idk. Not like it's replaced money for me, but sometimes I use it. I wouldn't go investing in it as a currency on its own but completely writing off at the very least the technology itself is a bit ignorant, don't you think? And don't forget that Ponzi schemes were originally invented using that foolproof valuable currency you cite as a foil to bitcoin's scam! I'd say the time and resources that go into making bitcoin have inherent value just like using a little bit of gold to fill a tooth.
- Ologn 11y ago> Works pretty fine for me when I buy stuff with it, idk. Were you around for the last .com bubble? You could have ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flooz.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flooz.com ) said the same thing ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beenz.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beenz.com ) back then ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s7V9I7LVp4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s7V9I7LVp4 ). Not that I'm saying startups are currently bubble level overvalued - but stuff like the Bitcoin hype is a canary in a coal mine. > but completely writing off at the very least the technology itself is a bit ignorant, don't you think? I can conceive of the possibility of people using blockchains and such things in the future for various reasons. I have no desire to right off the technology of the blockchain any more than I would write off the technology of a distributed git repository. The question though is whether Bitcoins should have a $4 billion market cap, and to me the answer is clearly no - it already fell from $11 billion to $4 billion, and I see this falling to $0. P.S. Re-watching that Whoopi Goldberg ad about "hip, young" Flooz versus "old, out of touch" money gives me deja vu all over again....
- zanny 11y ago> and I see this falling to $0. This implies that a trustless perfectly transparent currency has no value, which is obviously not true. Bitcoin might die because the protocol is flawed. It does make a lot of mistakes that altcoins do great work to solve - block size, chain size, volume, and proof of work are all messed up to varying degrees. The rate of monetary base inflation being a piecewise downward spiral to a limited final supply is in no way practical for a day to day currency, ever. But the technology basically crushes whatever nonsense you want to throw around when discussing fiat currencies, because at the end of the day every fiat dollar has to be "trust us". The financial industry has exploded on the back of phantom wealth with no physical asset backing, and bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general are the counter to that entirely by being perfectly forwarded backed assets moreso than any other holding or investment you can have. You can literally have the wallet file controlling a portion of wealth, and that wealth is backed by the computational power of the network, and the combined appraisals of everyone else using the money. If you hold gold shares, you have records that you own an amount of gold held by a third party trading company, maybe (its not like you are ever going to go withdraw it), and you are in good faith assuming the market cap is accurate, because nobody can actually summarize the amount of gold out there, even in just the investment market, accurately. And fiat dollars are even worse, since fractional reserve banking and digitization had led to tremendous amounts of money out there being literally numbers in a database but they have none of the benefits of bitcoin having a collective ledger of transaction history. The technology is superior. We just need a Snowden of money the way Snowden was of privacy to demonstrate that "trust us" is what has literally zero valuation.