Warren Buffett has been very vocal about Bitcoin with his opinions, predictions, and what he believes will be the logical outcome of Bitcoin and the cryptocurrency market over the long-term.
Let’s look at what Buffett has said about Bitcoin over the past 8 years.
Warren Buffett Bitcoin Opinion
“It’s ingenious and blockchain is important but Bitcoin has no unique value at all, it doesn’t produce anything. You can stare at it all day and no little Bitcoins come our or anything like that. It’s a delusion basically.” — “It’s ingenious and blockchain is important but Bitcoin has no unique value at all, it doesn’t produce anything. You can stare at it all day and no little Bitcoins come our or anything like that. It’s a delusion basically.” — Warren Buffett on CNBC, February 2019 CNBC, February 2019
“If you and I buy various cryptocurrencies, they’re not going to multiply. There are not going to be a bunch of rabbits sitting there in front of us. They’re just gonna sit there. And I gotta hope next time you get more excited after I’ve bought if from you and then I’ll get more excited and buy it from you. We could sit in the house by ourselves and we could keep running up the price between us. But at the end of the time there’s one Bitcoin sitting there and now we’ve gotta find somebody else. They come to an end.” — Warren Buffett on CNBC, May 2018
“In terms of cryptocurrencies generally, I can say almost with certainty that they will come to a bad ending. If I could buy a five-year put on every one of the cryptocurrencies, I’d be glad to do it, but I would never short a dime’s worth.” — Warren Buffett on CNBC, January 2018
“A rising price does create more buyers and people think ‘I’ve gotta get in on this’ and it’s better if they don’t understand it. If you don’t understand it you get much more excited than if you understand it.” — Warren Buffett on CNBC, May 2018
“Probably rat poison squared.” — Warren Buffett on Fox Business interview at 2018 meeting
“It will feed on itself for a while and sometimes for a long while and sometimes to extraordinary numbers. But they come to bad endings and cryptocurrencies will come to bad endings.” — Warren Buffett discussing speculative bubbles at Berkshire’s shareholder meeting in 2018.
“It draws in a lot of charlatans. It’s something where people who are of less than stellar character see an opportunity to clip people who are trying to get rich because their neighbor’s getting rich buying this stuff that neither one of them understands. It will come to a bad ending.” — Warren Buffett at the 2018 shareholder meeting
Why is Warren Buffett against Bitcoin?
“It’s a mirage basically. It’s a very effective way of transmitting money and you can do it anonymously and all that. A check is a way of transmitting money too. Are checks worth a whole lot of money just because they can transmit money? I hope Bitcoin becomes a better way of doing it but you can replicate it a bunch of different ways. The idea that it has some huge intrinsic value is just a joke in my view.” — Warren Buffett on CNBC, March 2014.
“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. It is not a durable means of exchange, it’s not a store of value. It’s been a very speculative kind of Buck Rogers-type thing and people buy and sell them because they hope they go up or down just like they did with tulip bulbs a long time ago.” — Warren Buffett on CNBC, March 2014
“If you told me you own all of the bitcoin in the world and you offered it to me for $25, I wouldn’t take it because what would I do with it?” he asked. “I’d have to sell it back to you one way or another. It isn’t going to do anything.” — Warren Buffett
“Cryptocurrencies basically have no value and they don’t produce anything. They don’t reproduce, they can’t mail you a check, they can’t do anything, and what you hope is that somebody else comes along and pays you more money for them later on, but then that person’s got the problem. In terms of value: zero.” — Warren Buffett on CNBC, February 2020
How much Bitcoin does Warren Buffet own?
Warren Buffett does not own any Bitcoin in 2022 and has never owned any. Buffett’s favorite asset classes are owning cash flowing businesses, quality publicly traded stocks at a good entry price, and farmland.
Warren Buffett on cryptocurrencies: “We don’t own any, we’re not short any. We’ll never have a position in them.” on CNBC, January 2018
“I get in enough trouble with things I think I know something about. Why in the world should I take a long or short position in something I don’t know anything about? We don’t have to know what cocoa beans are gonna do, or cryptocurrencies, we just have to focus on eight or 10 stocks.”— Warren Buffett on CNBC, January 2018
“You’re going to be a lot better off owning productive assets over the next 50 years than you will be owning pieces of paper or Bitcoin.” —Warren Buffett on CNBC, March 2014
He believes for most people the best thing they can do is buy and hold the S&P 500 index for the long-term.
“I recommend the S&P 500 index fund and have for a long, long time to people.” – Warren Buffett (May 2021)
For people that want to own individual stocks Buffett says: “All there is to investing is picking good stocks at good times and staying with them as long as they remain good companies.”
“If you said, for a 1% interest in all the farmland in the United States, pay our group $25 billion, I’ll write you a check this afternoon,” – Warren Buffett
Warren Buffett has owned farmland since his first purchase at a young age . He bought his first farm in Nebraska for around $10,000 before he entered high school with money earned from running a paper route.
“I don’t have any Bitcoin. I don’t own any cryptocurrency, I never will. I may start a Warren currency, maybe I can create one and say there’s only going to be 21 million of them. You can have it after I die but you can’t do anything with it except sell it to somebody else.” — Warren Buffett on CNBC, February 2020[1]
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