This quote is constantly bandied about as justification to invest in Bitcoin, and especially now that there has been some nice price movement in the upward direction. But this Warren Buffet quote is only relevant with the proper context, which is that Warren Buffet only invests in things he has a fundamental understanding of and can quantifiably value. You can confidently be greedy when others are fearful if you have a sound investment thesis and are a fundamental value investor. This is how he turns his investments into home runs, he knows what he's buying and what it's worth and can weather the negative sentiment until the market learns what he already knows. This doesn't apply at all to a speculative investment like crypto. Following this advice willy-nilly is gonna get you burned because you're misunderstanding the intent and the application.

Don't not buy Bitcoin if that's what you want to do, but don't fool yourself into thinking you're following Warren Buffet's advice. Warren Buffet doesn't speculate, and if you're buying crypto, you're speculating.

Even if it's not regulated, you're required to pay taxes on it. Regulation doesn't mean taxes. Regulation means control over how it's used for trade or investment. In the United States, it is both currently unregulated on the federal level and you are still required to pay federal taxes on your crypto gains. Regulations are aimed at the businesses that deal in crypto, not the individual user. If there's currently something that's illegal to do with cash, it's currently illegal to do it with Bitcoin. There will be no additional restrictions on you that don't already exist.

The law of diminishing returns means the people investing now are never going to see the types of gains that people in the beginning saw, but those stories of people getting rich off Bitcoin in the early days are undoubtedly driving those new investors to FOMO their way into crypto. The law of diminishing returns caps your upside here, and that also means you're taking on far more risk relative to the reward than those early adopters faced. You could get rich off a $100 speculative play if you were early enough. You have to put up tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to see the same type of gains now, and the risk of having that much capital in a speculative and volatile asset is beyond measure.

"Slightly" is a great understatement about how much safer stocks are than crypto. Crypto's value is arbitrary and subject to whim and emotion. To a certain extent, stocks are as well at times, but they have a baseline inherent value because they are legal ownership of a business. Stocks represent cash flows of the business, and crypto prices don't represent anything except what a large group of people are guessing it's worth at any given time. There is some degree of speculation involved in the stock market, but crypto "investing" is nothing BUT speculation.

Anyone arguing KYC is a bad thing is probably a scammer or someone who launders money from illegal activities. Our economy is thrives because people are accountable for bad actions, and KYC is a necessary component to holding bad actors accountable and minimizing fraud and illegal activities. Government's forcing KYC on crypto is undoubtedly a good thing. There's a lot of whining and complaining about what governments do or stepping on 'muh freedoms,' but the fact remains that governments main responsibility is to protect individuals from people who seek to do harm, and that includes fostering a stable and transparent economic and financial system, which is the sole goal of KYC.

Bitcoin hasn't been around anywhere near long enough to talk about what it does in relation to inflation. Even if it had been, the track record is absolutely horrendous in terms of protecting value. If you're investing in Bitcoin to protect yourself from the 1-2% loss of value due to inflation per year, you have to be ignoring the substantial risk of 60% loss of value that Bitcoin is prone to suffer in any given year. That's an idiotic way to manage risk and basically cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Stock ownership is a legal ownership of the underlying business in proportion to the number of shares you own. Bitcoin is just an asset. Real estate is an asset too, but it has income generating capabilities. Bitcoin doesn't. You won't earn income from buying Bitcoin, the only thing you could possibly get out of it is price appreciation, which requires you to sell it to someone who will pay more for it than what you paid for it. This is a severe shortcoming that makes the price unstable and subject to rampant speculation.

You can't just flip and switch and have the infrastructure to have a crypto exchange. It takes a long time to build this out, so I would expect you hear an awful lot about it before anything actually happens, and probably for a long time while they're building it.


Lol, crypto investors only pay lip service to using it as a currency. The only thing 90% of the people who bought it care about is the price, and they don't care if it's going up because it's being used as a currency or not.

Bitcoin doesn't pay anything for investing in it, it's just an asset that is worth whatever everyone agrees it is worth. It's not a good investment in that you can't depend on it to hold value predictibly because its value is entirely arbitrary and subject to the whim of, at this point, a large group of people who have no idea how investing works. Because of this, it's much more of a gamble than anyone who is pro-Bitcoin realizes or wants to admit. Everyone is far more content thinking they're geniuses for buying Bitcoin without any real justification for thinking so.

Blockchain might come to be a technology that has an impact on large sections of the economy, such as recording and accessing public records, but this doesn't necessarily mean anything for Bitcoin or crypto. In those applications, blockchain would be the underlying technology but there is no utility for Bitcoin there, so there would be no beneficial impact on the price. People have trouble separating the use case for blockchain with the hype for crypto generally.

No, most of them are not. Only the ones who are out of their mind and don't have a need for credibility are making such a reckless prediction. Price predictions are pretty worthless because no one is held responsible for wrong predictions. So if it doesn't reach $50,000 this year, no one is going to remember the name of anyone who made such a  stupid prediction, and in the short term, they get a lot of attention right now for making such a headline grabbing prediction. It's entirely self-serving; all upside no downside. That's why you see such dumb predictions like that.

My take is because crypto doesn't actually do anything useful in the real world as far as banking is concerned. The hype for how much crypto is going to change the world is quite overblown. The use cases for crypto are thin. When it comes down to payments, crypto is a marginal improvement in very limited aspects of a transaction. In virtually every case, cash (and electronic cash) is far superior. And aside from crypto, people think blockchain will change the banking industry but no one is able to give a real good use case for it. My take on that is because there is none. Blockchain is a solution to a problem nobody needs solved because the centralized system works fine. Blockchain doesn't improve on it.

The risk of volatility in gold and silver prices is far, FAR higher than the risk of depreciation of bank deposits except over very long time periods like several decades. The shorter your time horizon, the higher the volatility risk. It is only over very long periods of time that gold and silver can be expected to show steady real values (as opposed to nominal values), because the daily fluctuations are smoothed out over long periods of time. Gold and silver fairly regularly suffer 10% or more losses in a month, and that level of loss is something you will never see in such a short time frame from a bank deposit. Bank deposits are far safer.

Yes, the stock market as a whole is far safer than the crypto market. Crypto is a speculative asset that is only worth what everyone agrees it is worth; it has no inherent value. Stock ownership is a legal ownership stake in a business. The inherent value in stocks is the cash flow and profit the business produces. I've never heard of a forex market being more volatile] than the crypto market. You're going to have to provide something to back that up, because it defies common sense.

The last bit about having to keep an eye on stock investing is wrong, at least it requires no more attention than crypto investing. Crypto is far more volatile, and therefore requires far more attention for risk of losing your investment during a crash.

Zuckerberg is already on the record as saying that Facebook will never charge subscription fees, so there's really no reason to adopt any sort of crypto anything for the purpose of paying for Facebook services. The company derives the vast majority of its revenue from advertising, and there's no indication this is going to change. Facebook has tried to roll out a payments platform inside its messenger service with no real success, but again there's no reason to expect blockchain to solve any issues here. Facebook itself would act as third party record keeper for the payments, it wouldn't need blockchain for that.

As far as I can tell, Bill Gates never said this. It doesn't even sound like something he would say. I searched for a source and I can't find it. For whatever reason, Bill Gates has long been the "source" of various sayings that are supposed to connote some kind of wisdom, but he never actually said them. For example, the famous "list of rules kids won't learn in school" has long been attributed to Bill Gates but also never came from Bill Gates:  https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/some-rules-kids-wont-learn-in-school/

If you see a quote on the internet being attributed to Bill Gates, there's probably a pretty good chance he didn't say it.

Or alternatively, the price went down rapidly because it was a bubble and the market is restoring some sanity to what was unreasonable and unsustainable price levels. The core problem with Bitcoin is that in order to make money off it, you have to sell it to someone who will pay more for it than what you paid for it. This means that there are more and more people who have Bitcoin and are looking for people to sell to, which is a continually shrinking number as more people already own Bitcoin and are removed from the buying pool. So you have an increasing number of BTC holders looking to sell into a shrinking pool of buyers, and you can see over time how that will create a very distorted market that is inevitably going to crash. We've had a number of crashes over the years. The last one was only the largest.

I've heard the exact opposite from people who travel in Europe, and that is that the majority of merchants deal primarily in cash and are rather annoyed when another dumb American comes along with their credit card to pay for something because it's slower and more of a hassle than dealing with cash. Part of the investment thesis for companies such as Square and PayPal is that Europe is a prime market for expansion due to the number of transactions that still happen in cash there, as opposed to the US market where the vast majority of transactions occur in credit, debit, or some other form of electronic payment.

There will not always be new investors in the market. Believing there will be makes you very susceptible to buying into a bubble. First, there are a finite number of people in the world. Second, not everyone is a potential BTC investor, so now you're starting with a finite number and making it smaller. Next, not everyone has access to the internet, so the number shrinks again. Next, not everyone is going to likely to risk their savings to invest in an unproven and speculative asset, and the number drops again. The longer you go on, the more you see that the number of people to buy Bitcoin from you for more than what you paid for it is much, MUCH smaller than the total number of people. So no, there's not always new investors in the market, and the price of Bitcoin is not going to go up forever. Believing otherwise is believing in a fallacy.

Never buying in the first place is the best way to avoid losses. Not selling when you're down doesn't avoid the loss, it just keeps the potential to earn it back open. People confuse this all the time. Bitcoin is an asset. The minute it depreciates in value, you have lost the money. If you don't sell, you could get it back, but you could also lose more. Bitcoin is speculative and very risky. You cannot avoid risk of loss by buying and never selling. Refusing to recognize this fact is to live in denial of reality. Might make you feel better, but that doesn't make it correct. If you're worried about losing money, don't buy BTC in the first place. That's the best (and only) way to avoid losses.