‘Rat poison squared’: 7 years since Buffett’s Bitcoin barb
The famed billionaire investor had harsh words for Bitcoin seven years ago
Warren Buffett | USA International Trade Administration/"Warren Buffett at the 2015 SelectUSA Investement Summit" (government work license and Andy Vinnikov/Shutterstock and Adobe modified by Blockworks
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Yes, Warren Buffett is one of the greatest to ever do it. But he clearly has a blind spot for Bitcoin.
It’s seven years ago today that Buffett famously called Bitcoin “rat poison squared” in front of CNBC reporter Becky Quick.
Buffett, who at 94 has just confirmed that he’s stepping aside as Berkshire Hathaway CEO at the end of the year, has actually been negging Bitcoin since May 2013. At Berkshire’s annual shareholder meeting, an audience member asked Buffett and Munger how they viewed the rising significance of Bitcoin.
“Charlie, I hope you know something about this subject, because I don’t know a thing,” Buffett said. By that point in 2013, the price of bitcoin had jumped from $11 to almost $150 in the past six months.
On This Day: Rat Poison Squared
Munger was blunt. “I have no confidence whatsoever in bitcoin being any kind of a big universal currency.”
“That would certainly be my gut reaction,” Buffett replied. “But I haven’t really looked into it. I’ll put it this way, of our $49 billion, we haven’t moved any to bitcoin.” Cue audience laughter.
“Well, the truth is that I don’t really know anything about it. That doesn’t always stop me from talking about things, but it will in this case.”
The takes never improved from there. “It’s not a currency, it does not meet the test of a currency, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s not around in 10 or 20 years,” Buffett said a year later.
“Stay away from it. It’s a mirage, basically…the idea that it has some huge intrinsic value is just a joke in my view,” he added a few days on from that.
There are already many thoughtful critiques of Buffett and Munger’s opinions on Bitcoin out there. And his investment philosophy — of not investing in anything he doesn’t understand — has obviously worked.
“We just have to focus on eight or 10 stocks, business basically, that we think are decent businesses,” Buffett said in 2018. Berkshire Hathaway’s stock price has tripled since then. Bitcoin’s price, meanwhile, has multiplied almost 13 times in the same period, although directly comparing the two makes little sense.
Does that make Buffett wrong? Sure, in the way that someone who bought Amazon instead of Google 10 years ago is wrong. Both Berkshire and Bitcoin have clearly won: 5.5 million percent returns since 1964 for the former, nearly 137 million percent since 2010 for the latter.
Regardless of how cashed-up Berkshire may be — even without buying bitcoin — it has still missed out big time.
Had Buffett allocated only 2% of Berkshire’s $57.9 billion to bitcoin in May 2018, instead of calling it rat poison squared, the firm might’ve bought up to about 137,000 BTC, potentially for under $8,500 per coin on average.
The same haul today would be valued at more than $13.1 billion, boosting Berkshire’s current cash holdings by almost 30%.
What doesn’t kill you is meant to make you stronger. And what you don’t know can’t hurt you. But as it turns out, it can make you poorer, relatively. Even if you’re very, very rich.
— David
The Historian’s View
You know the saying: One man’s rat poison is another man’s treasure…
If you need more proof of the errors of Buffett’s worldview, there’s the tale of HyphyMikey, a BitcoinTalk user who for all we know is still holding on to this 100 BTC gold bar he posted for sale, exactly 12 years ago.
Today, the artifact lives on on social media as a talisman from an earlier Bitcoin time, one when you might be someone like HyphyMikey, an early forum user who bought this heirloom (alongside two 25 BTC gold coins) and then tried to sell it to purchase a new car.
Did Hyphy sell? We don’t really know. All told, there’s about 214 of these $10 million Bitcoin bars floating around, though only 37 are “active” and yet to be redeemed for their BTC. (This is where you run into the whole difficult-to-trace part of Bitcoin.)
Though we might never know, it’s another reminder to HODL your BTC. In another 10 years, who knows how expensive this bar will get (and how much more wrong Buffett will be).
— Rizzo
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