Warren Buffett on buying bitcoin: 'That is not investing'

Sat, Apr 28, 2018, 5:07 AM 1 min read

“If you buy something like a farm, an apartment house, or an interest in a business… You can do that on a private basis… And it’s a perfectly satisfactory investment. You look at the investment itself to deliver the return to you. Now, if you buy something like bitcoin or some cryptocurrency, you don’t really have anything that has produced anything. You’re just hoping the next guy pays more.”

When you buy cryptocurrency, Buffett continues, “You aren’t investing when you do that. You’re speculating. There’s nothing wrong with it. If you wanna gamble somebody else will come along and pay more money tomorrow, that’s one kind of game. That is not investing.”

To be sure, many big banks, and blue-chip American corporations like IBM (a company Buffett himself backed heavily for nearly a decade), have embraced blockchain, the underlying decentralized ledger technology on which bitcoin is built.

But for now, Warren Buffett isn’t buying crypto.

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