It was interesting to hear Mr. Buffett’s take on Bitcoin in the extended CNBC interview with Becky Quick this week. That single interview on CNBC is probably the best 3 hours of financial media that viewers get a few times a year.
Mr. Buffett’s comment on Bitcoin: “If you sit there and watch it, it doesn’t do anything, it doesn’t reproduce”, which is actually pretty humorous. (I couldn’t help but think that Mr. Buffett was thinking about farmland, which he has always said he would prefer to own, rather than a similar quantity of gold.)
One important lesson learned from Economics 101 I still remember from freshman year of college, 1978, is that in economics, a currency or money is either a “store of value” or “a medium of exchange”. (It was surprising to read Wikipedia’s “store of value” definition since it seems very similar to Investopedia’s “medium of exchange” definition.)
Are the the “store of value” versus “medium of exchange” terms really all that different ? On their face, it doesn’t appear to be the case, but my own definition of store of value was that it was intended to mean “intrinsic value”, which paper currency, gold and bitcoin lack.
As JP Morgan demonstrated this week, cryptocurrency likely has a future as a medium of exchange (in my opinion). It seems like a product looking for a market, the last few years, and that market needs to develop around the cryptocurrency and Bitcoin over time.
Thanks for reading.
Feel free to disagree and I’d welcome reader’s informed opinions on this topic.