Bitcoin is in the midst of a renaissance.
The most popular cryptocurrency in recent weeks has exited the crypto winter, a prolonged period of falling prices.
The price of bitcoin exceeded what its investors consider the symbolic threshold of $30,000, a level the biggest cryptocurrency had not reached since June 2022.
Prices were trading around $30,033 at last check, according to data firm CoinGecko. That reflects an 81% increase this year.
Bitcoin has benefited from the banking crisis, which is causing many investors to withdraw their deposits from banks. In addition, investors looking for assets with attractive yields have more incentive to take on risk as many experts now anticipate at least a pause in the Federal Reserve's interest rate hikes.
The spectacular rise of bitcoin has given voice to the evangelists of the king of cryptocurrencies. They are reiterating that bitcoin is a currency independent of political power and central banks, unlike fiat currencies.
Bitcoin 'Is Simply a Gamble': Warren Buffett
But if there's one critic left unmoved by the bitcoin revival, it's legendary investor Warren Buffett. The billionaire and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A) (BRK.B) has once again expressed his contempt for cryptocurrency.
"It is simply it's a gamble," Buffett told CNBC in an interview on April 12. "It doesn't have any intrinsic value and resources. It doesn't have any value."
He continued: "But that doesn't stop people from wanting to play the roulette wheel."
This isn't the first time the Oracle of Omaha, as he is nicknamed, has spoken harshly about bitcoin. Last year, Buffett, 92, and his right-hand man, Charlie Munger, 99, thrashed bitcoin at Berkshire Hathaway's annual meeting.
"If you tell me you own all 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? It is going to do anything," he said. "If I try to get rid of it, why should I buy some bitcoin?"
He once said that the world's first cryptocurrency is “probably rat poison squared.”
"Whether it goes up and down, in the next year, or five or 10 years, I don’t know. But the one thing I’m pretty sure of is that it doesn’t produce anything," Buffett said last April. "It’s got a magic to it and people have attached magic to lots of things."
'Wild and Wooly Capitalism'
In February, Munger had asked the U.S. to follow China's example by simply banning cryptocurrencies.
"In the U.S. in recent years, privately owned companies have issued thousands of new cryptocurrencies, large and small," Munger wrote in an op-ed published in The Wall Street Journal on Feb. 2. "These have later become publicly traded without any governmental pre-approval of disclosures.
"In some cases, a big block of cryptocurrency has been sold to a promoter for almost nothing, after which the public buys in at much higher prices without fully understanding the pre-dilution in favor of the promoter," the famous investor laments.
He calls it "wild and wooly capitalism." And he harks back to a phrase attributed to Mark Twain: "A mine is a hole in the ground with a liar on top.”
The vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, the holding company he leads with Buffett, then delivers a murderous blow to cryptocurrencies.
"A cryptocurrency is not a currency, not a commodity, and not a security," he writes. "Instead, it’s a gambling contract with a nearly 100% edge for the house, entered into in a country where gambling contracts are traditionally regulated only by states that compete in laxity."
So what to do? Munger has a radical solution: "Obviously the U.S. should now enact a new federal law that prevents this from happening."
