Warren Buffett continues to doubt Bitcoin, believe digital coin has no ‘unique value’

Legendary investor Warren Buffett remains unconvinced that the original cryptocurrency, Bitcoin (BTC) has any value.

In a recent interview with CNBC, the chief executive officer of Berkshire Hathaway described Bitcoin as a “delusion” and argued that “has no unique value at all”.

“It attracts charlatans,” Buffett told CNBC’s Becky Quick on Monday. “If you do something phony by going out and selling yo-yos or something, there’s no money in it — but when you get into Wall Street, there’s huge money.”

At the same time, Buffett acknowledged Bitcoin’s underlying technology, the blockchain, was “important”, but argued that the success of the tech did not depend on Bitcoin. He pointed to J. P. Morgan’s recently announced plan to launch its own crypto token, possibly to illustrate why BTC’s position is not a unique one.

Like Buffett, J. P. Morgan’s chief executive officer Jamie Dimon has been among Bitcoin’s biggest doubters for a long time. In 2017, Dimon infamously called BTC a “fraud” and while he later said he regretted having said that, he maintained that he was not interested in the cryptocurrency.

But even when levelling its harshest criticism at Bitcoin, Dimon kept praising the blockchain. “Blockchain is real. You can have crypto yen and dollars and stuff like that,” the CEO said in an interview with Fox Business in early 2018.

Perhaps this explains the recent turn of events, which saw J. P. Morgan announcing that it had created its own digital coin designed to enable instantaneous transfer of payments between institutional accounts. The new token, called JPM Coin, is a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar. The US banking giant plans to run real world trials for the coin in a few months.