Berkshire Hathaway President and CEO Warren Buffett gave another blow to Bitcoin (BTC) by reiterating a previous warning that investors in the virtual currency will regret one day. According to Buffett, the purchase of bitcoin or other virtual currencies is not an investment, but a speculative game.
"The asset itself is not creating anything. "When you are buying non-productive assets, all that counts is that the next person will pay you more because you are even more excited about the arrival of another next person," Warren Buffett told CNBC on the sidelines of the annual Berkshire Hathaway shareholders' meeting. .
'Poisonous rat squared'
According to Becky Quick, a CNBC reporter Buffett rated the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, "rat poison squared." Buffett's business partner, Charlie Munger, compared the leading virtual currency with the turds that are exchanged for people suffering from dementia. Earlier this year, Buffett had also criticized digital currencies to warn people to stay away from them.
Unlike Buffett, although the younger billionaires in the technology sector have been more optimistic about virtual currencies. This includes Tim Draper, a venture capitalist; Peter Thiel, co-founder of payment services firm PayPal and Jack Dorsey, executive director of Twitter and Square. These billionaires are convinced that digital currencies are here in the long term and will displace fiduciary currencies over time.
Bitcoin bull
Draper relies so much on the increase in bitcoin that he sees the cryptocurrency increasing to $ 250,000 over the next five years. This was not the first time that Draper made a prediction about the virtual currency. In 2015, Draper had predicted that by the end of 2017 the bitcoin price would rise above $ 10,000. This happened and even exceeded its objective. However, the price of digital currency has since fallen below $ 10,000.
It is estimated that the holdings of bitcoins of the venture capitalist are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. In 2014, Draper bought bitcoins totaling 30,000 that had been confiscated by the Marshalls Service of the United States during a criminal raid. At the time he bought each of the coins at $ 600 each.