He seems salty about missing the train on tech companies (and that growth companies have been beating value companies for years) and blockchain. Agree on jealousy.

The part about kidnapping is the eternal argument against any attempt to increase privacy, the 4 horsemen of the infocalypse:

- terrorists,

- pedophiles,

- drug dealers,

- money launderers / organized crimes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...

Buffetts comments are still spot on.

Right now bitcoin is a gambling thing.

Why else would you invest in it right now? There is no legit reasoning why someone would invest this kind of money.

Right now every ten minutes bitcoin as a system pays out bitcoin of 300.000$ for avg of 2000 transactions.

What real value would bitcoin has, right now, to make this kind of investment not just gambling?

And from a pur statistic value, I bought 100% drugs with my bitcoins (probably 500-1000$ per year for the last 5? Years) while I do know stories of friends who bought one pizza or one Döner, no one I know use bitcoin for anything else.

So I don't share your criticism. After all btc is invented out of thin air and you don't need to put that kind of money into btc as itt doesn't support the research of cryptocurrency.

I think one legitimate reason to invest is if you consider what a world would look like post-USD dominance.

Suppose there is high inflation in the next ten years or so. Inflation is harmful to savers in addition to business, since it makes planning difficult. How can you create long term plans ten years out if you don't know what the dollar will buy you a few years from now.

There will have to be a new standard for which to price contracts going further out. What will that be? Europe is a mess. The West doesn't trust China. Gold was used historically pre-fiat money but the government has a history of manipulating gold supply since the Fed owns a lot of gold and personally owning gold was made illegal in the US in the past.

Which leaves Bitcoin as a strong candidate for some kind of reference. The idea is that a currency goes from novelty -> store of value -> transactions -> unit of account.

I'm not saying this will happen, but it's wrong to say that investing in Bitcoin is just gambling.

>Bitcoin is used for crime (as if fiat wasn't?)

His point was, as I saw it, that has many other uses beyond crime and speculation.

Fiat was surely used for crime since the beginning of it, and this hasn't prevented its adoption. Frankly, anything can be used as a way to fund crime, whether it's a fungible currency or tangible goods/services.

Just because something can be used maliciously doesn't mean it should be demonized and banished despite its non-malicious potential (cryptocurrencies is one of the very few real use-cases of blockchain).

> speculation

Isn't his entire empire nowadays based on essentially speculation? Very bold from him to complain about this. I definitely feel jealousy in there.

Sure but that's kind of like saying that since cars kill many more people than RPGs that it's unfair to only ban RPGs and not cars too.