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Buffett bashes Bitcoin as nonproductive, thriving on mystique

reuters.com

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Re: Buffett bashes Bitcoin as nonproductive, thriving on mystique

#151

Post by 97s »

LargeWu wrote: post #129
hudon wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bitcoin will resist inflation and is somewhat out of control of governments or any central authority Can you back this up? From what I can tell, governments can ban mining, shut down exchanges and co-erce developers. If the handful of devs that have commit access to Bitcoin were working for the CIA, would we know? What kind of damage could they do? Eg. Could they introduce consensus bugs without anyone noticing? >…

> From what I can tell, governments can ban mining, shut down exchanges and co-erce developers. Cutting off exchanges from financial institutions will likely be the primary way the government attacks cryptocurrencies. Just look at what happened to online gambling 10 years ago. Online poker and sports gambling were booming. What the US did was prevent banking companies from doing business from gambling companies or in…

Exactly this, this is one of the very reasons I have not invested in bitcoin. Anything relating to a technology and banks that hasn't been stamp of approved is a risk. I luckily got the news before it happened and withdrew all my money from neteller and poker sites before they went down, however I had friends that had a lot of money locked up for months.

Re: Buffett bashes Bitcoin as nonproductive, thriving on mystique

#152

Post by loeg »

dominotw wrote: post #64
loeg wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If anything it was the 'tap-to-pay' feature of debit/credit cards that is finally putting some death-knell pressure on cash. It's so much faster than paying with a pin card or cash... Is it just me or aren't debit/credit cards much faster than paying with cash, too? Making change and then dealing with all of the coins is way higher effort than swipe, maybe pin or sign, and move on. And the sign step is going away,…

A large portion of US workforce works for cash.

I don't see what that's got to do with speed of payment.

Re: Buffett bashes Bitcoin as nonproductive, thriving on mystique

#153

Post by drcode »

zrobotics wrote: post #150
drcode wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this to be such a curious argument: "The graphics card industry would be so much better off if these cryptocurrency people would stop giving AMD and Nvidia so much money!"

From an AMD PR: “The cryptocurrency market is unstable and demand could change quickly. For example, China and South Korea have recently instituted restrictions on cryptocurrency trading. If we are unable to manage the risks related to a decrease in the demand for cryptocurrency mining, our GPU business could be materially adversely affected.”[1] The mining market is too unstable to bet trillions of dollars expanding…

That is a very well formulated rebuttal to my argument- I agree there is some truth in this.

Re: Buffett bashes Bitcoin as nonproductive, thriving on mystique

#154

Post by s73v3r_ »

trixie_ wrote: post #111
s73v3r_ wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Most importantly it can't be created/destroyed at will by a central government." This is not cut and dry as to whether it is a benefit or not. Many people, myself included, don't consider it a benefit. Not having control over your currency makes it that much harder to respond in times of recession. Greece was hit quite hard by the Great Recession, and one of the reasons why is because they didn't have control over t…

You put your trust in governments to not mess with the currency. That's on you. When shit hits the fan people buy gold, it's no different with crypto. People don't trust the government to manage currency correctly in times of trouble. But even in good times, crypto has a lot going for it. Transactions are very fast and very low compared to traditional currency. Often it takes days to move money between banks, or will…

"You put your trust in governments to not mess with the currency. That's on you. When shit hits the fan people buy gold, it's no different with crypto. People don't trust the government to manage currency correctly in times of trouble. But even in good times, crypto has a lot going for it."

Some people, not all people. And that's why I said that it unsure whether that's an actual value or not.

"Transactions are very fast and very low compared to traditional currency. Often it takes days to move money between banks, or will cost you much more than a bitcoin transaction fee to move faster."

No, not really. Credit card transactions are far, far faster than a Bitcoin one. Bank transfers in Europe are quite fast, too.

"Again, bitcoin could have 100x the users and the power requirements would be negligible compared to banking. There is no 'scale up' power wise needed for bitcoin."

You're gonna have to provide a citation for this.

Re: Buffett bashes Bitcoin as nonproductive, thriving on mystique

#155

Post by s73v3r_ »

mr_spothawk wrote: post #108
s73v3r_ wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hypotheticals aren't relevant here, though. Amazon isn't cancelling AWS anytime soon.

How about the not-hypothetical? > How many transactions can your business perform if AWS blocks you, or your transaction type?

That applies to very few people doing legitimate things, although there are some. In that case, you may find some value in it, or in the several other alternative payment processors.

Re: Buffett bashes Bitcoin as nonproductive, thriving on mystique

#156

Post by davnicwil »

Mithorium wrote: post #50
ashoon wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I've learned a bit about blockchain, I feel cryptocurrency is distracting from the broader implications of the technology. It's going to be hard enough for non-technical users to see the underlying value of immutable, distributed data and applications, so that conflation is unfortunate.

The technology has existed for many years already, and it has already made 'broader implications', see git. The only thing new about it is that people now call it 'blockchain' instead of a merkle tree. The reason banks and governments don't use better technology to track land titles or whatever other applications is that they're always slow to adopt technology, not because 'blockchain' is a new concept

But this isn't really the case. Both git and blockchain track a history of actions, true, the difference is that in git anyone can rewrite history at any time and there is then no way to agree amongst untrusted parties whose history is the true one. With blockchain, there is. That's the innovation, that's what makes blockchain novel.

Re: Buffett bashes Bitcoin as nonproductive, thriving on mystique

#157

Post by kolbe »

csa wrote: post #135
kolbe wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, my point is that Buffett usually just uses some sound byte to bash it, like 'rat poison squared'. Give us an actual argument. Or convince us that he's done significant research into BTC to come to this conclusion. It's just frustrating to hear him make a very outlandish claim like this, and then not educate us with the explanation.

His argument against it, much like gold, would be that it is merely a store of value rather than a productive asset (e.g., crop-yielding land, companies, etc.). If you read up on his comments on hold (someone copy-pasted it elsewhere in this thread), you will see that this is nothing more than his investment thesis. It seems to work well for him.

I understand why he doesn't invest in them. I mentioned that in my original post. I want to know why he is so extremely bearish. Not why it fails to meet his investment criteria.

Statements like "rat poison squared" are not the same thing as disliking non-productive assets. I'm sure he doesn't think gold is going to $0. I want to hear why he thinks that Bitcoin is particularly destined for a price of zero. This is the analysis that he never gives us.

Re: Buffett bashes Bitcoin as nonproductive, thriving on mystique

#158

Post by hndamien »

notahacker wrote: post #126
trixie_ wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scarcity is absolutely an intrinsic value. Gold has value because it is relatively scarce given the difficulty to mine. In addition to being really shiny which was valued by our ancestors. There are lots of useful rare elements used in manufacturing. In terms of a currency though gold has nothing on bitcoin. Gold is hard to move, hard to validate as authentic, heavy, easy to steal, etc..

My excrement is several orders of magnitude more scarce than Bitcoins and gold bars alike, but it has no value because nobody wants it. Scarcity relative to demand pushes up market prices (i.e. extrinsic value) but that's something entirely different...

Maybe you can work on drumming up demand for your excrement. Fecal transplants are a thing now.

Re: Buffett bashes Bitcoin as nonproductive, thriving on mystique

#159

Post by hndamien »

fixermark wrote: post #46
triviatise wrote: post #9

He has always said he doesnt understand technology and has resisted investing in it. While the value is fluctuating heavily due to speculation, over time it will stabilize. Bitcoin will resist inflation and is somewhat out of control of governments or any central authority. People in countries where the govt has screwed up the currency can use it to get money out of the country or as a stable store even if dollars or…

Question regarding the list of "fundamental properties of money": Should "liquid" (easy to spend and trusted to be exchangeable for goods or services) be on that list? I wonder if it's generally left off because it's assumed, but BTC is not currently what I would consider "liquid;" the average time to confirm a transaction ranges from 30 minutes to (sometimes) over 16 hours [source: https://coincentral.com/how-long-d…

Compare how liquid it is to real-estate. I'd say it is pretty liquid.

Re: Buffett bashes Bitcoin as nonproductive, thriving on mystique

#160

Post by hndamien »

sizzzzlerz wrote: post #35
Cyph0n wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And he regrets not investing in Amazon back in the 90s. I believe that he only recently started to invest in tech.

He bought IBM in 2011. That was his first venture in tech companies. Apple came along in 2016.

So he probably lost money on that.
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