Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger on crypto in 2018

It is relevant because if something has a use, there is a basis for the value. If something is only valuable because people believe it to be valuable, then you must maintain that belief in order to maintain that value. For instance a used stamp that is rare is valuable to collectors even though it has no use, but aside from a few collectors there is no market for that stamp. The problem with a huge market filled by people buying due to speculation is that as soon as something spooks the market it tanks and the value doesn't hold, because people don't actually want the thing they are holding, they just want to be able to sell it to someone else. This is why the crypto scene is very cultish -- it is all built on maintaining the belief, and the utility is secondary.

I understand, and hope we can keep the conversation sober going forward.

To answer your questions without any use of metaphors:

I do not know whether Crypto is a good or a bad idea. I am merely trying not to be presumptive about it.

The horse metaphor is an attempt to lead some attention to the fact that we several times in the history have seen long adaptation time for certain technologies we benefit from on large scale.

So what can you do with Mexican Peso if you are in Europe? Can you buy Food? Drugs? Probably not. Does it matter if you bought it solely to speculate on its value? Clearly it does not. If you bought Mexican Peso yesterday and sell it today for a profit then that's it. Why would you care about what it is good for? The whole point of speculating with assets is to make profit from price movements.

Now replace Mexican Peso with baseball cards then with crypto. There is no difference. Everyone knows baseball cards are useless and wont let you buy food not even drugs. But if you get an opportunity to make money trading them why would you not? Trading crypto or even NFTs is just way way simpler than trading baseball cards so more people have access to it.

If all the people who constantly say how useless everything is would actually put their money where their mouth is and would trade and bet on lower prices then they would make huge money. And in the long run it would stabilize the market so we dont get these absurd bubbles and JPEGs temporary worth millions. But its all talk no action. The market requires the "everything is worthless" people to counter the "everything is gold" people. Yet these people just stay on the side line and every 4 year when it crashes they come together and slap each-other on the back for being too clever to partake.

Personally I dont mind it, these huge waves are where money can be made. The recent crashes have been very profitable for me.

>But forex enables international trade.

So does crypt. And cheap international remittance. Everything just runs better if liquidity is high in any asset.

The whole FTX crash and all that dint change anything its just a large fraudulent entity which's fallout will now affect the whole market. The exchange actually runs on the traditional financial system everything they did that was fraudulent wasn't crypt fraud it was just normal fraud. If anything this once again shows that you should not give your money to anyone else and that the government will not protect people form criminals. Needless to say that traditional market invested in FTX so they will be affected too.

You can certainly purchase from a Mexican exporter if you're in Europe with pesos.

> If you bought Mexican Peso yesterday and sell it today for a profit then that's it. Why would you care about what it is good for? The whole point of speculating with assets is to make profit from price movements.

I mean, funnily enough, I've heard this sort of reasoning:

> And now all of a sudden everyone's like, wow, people just decide to put $200 million in the box. This is a pretty cool box, right? Like this is a valuable box as demonstrated by all the money that people have apparently decided should be in the box. And who are we to say that they're wrong about that? Like, you know, this is, I mean boxes can be great. Look, I love boxes as much as the next guy. And so what happens now? All of a sudden people are kind of recalibrating like, well, $20 million, that's it? Like that market cap for this box? And it's been like 48 hours and it already is $200 million, including from like sophisticated players in it. They're like, come on, that's too low. And they look at these ratios, TVL, total value locked in the box, you know, as a ratio to market cap of the box’s token.

But, on the other hand, well,

> If all the people who constantly say how useless everything is would actually put their money where their mouth is and would trade and bet on lower prices then they would make huge money.

I have heard this as well:

> So you've got this boxes and it’s kind of dumb, but like what's the end game, right? This box is worth zero obviously. And like that, you know, you can't like keep this smart cap or something. But on the other hand, if everyone kind of now thinks that this box token is worth about a billion dollar market cap, that's what people are pricing it at and sort of has that market cap. Everyone's gonna mark to market. In fact, you can even finance this, right? You put X token in a borrow lending protocol and borrow dollars with it. If you think it's worth like less than two thirds of that, you could even just like put some in there, take the dollars out. Never, you know, give the dollars back. You just get liquidated eventually. And it is sort of like real monetizable stuff in some senses. And you know, at some point if the world never decides that we are wrong about this in like a coordinated way, right? Like you're kind of the guy calling and saying, no, this thing's actually worthless, but in what sense are you right?

Shorting is tricky for many reasons. There's the counterparty risk of how you're going to actually collect (say you borrow against FTT to get Tether which you use as collateral for your FTT loan; who's to say Tether is worth anything?). The space is rife with market manipulation, so you could take a short position and just get wiped out. And it could just keep going up until it goes back down.

I'd love to be bullish on crypto. I still have some. But like I said, it simply can't be healthy that pretty much every crypto financial product seems to just be based around crypto. It's like a stock exchange where every listed company just trades stock of other companies on the exchange.

Yes, good point. Amazon does not pay a dividend. But I think they are a successful tech company that delivers value and an understandable return on their stock.