Last week, the crypto industry was once again hit when it was revealed that Warren Buffett — co-CEO of Berkshire Hathaway and one of the world’s richest people — had bashed Bitcoin for the umpteenth time in a few years.
Per previous reports from Blockonomi, the investing legend confirmed that he will never own cryptocurrency (and never has), adding that digital assets, Bitcoin included, have no inherent value:
Cryptocurrencies basically have no value and they don’t produce anything. In terms of value: zero.
This comment from Buffett regarding Bitcoin is reminiscent of his previous statements on the matter, such as when he called the cryptocurrency “rat poison squared” and saying that the asset has not much more value than a suit button.
The anti-crypto rhetoric continued into this week, with the Bank of England’s soon-to-be governor bashing Bitcoin in a speech made in front of the U.K. Parliament.
Bank of England’s Future Leader Trashes Cryptocurrency… Again
During a recent meeting of the Treasury Select Committee, Andrew Bailey — the former deputy governor of the Bank of England that is soon to be the governor of the central bank — openly lambasted cryptocurrencies.
In the meeting, he said that Bitcoin remains a highly speculative and volatile investment that may result in investors losing “all [their] money”:
If you want to want to buy Bitcoin, be prepared to lose all your money. If you want to buy it, fine, but understand that what you’ve got has no intrinsic value. It might have extrinsic value, but no intrinsic value.
Bailey added that as he sees it, the cryptocurrency has yet to gain much traction.
Many in the cryptocurrency space haven’t taken his comments lightly. Bitcoin price tracking application Blockfolio jokingly snarked “ok banker” in response to Bailey’s comments, referencing the “ok boomer” meme that made its rounds late last year.
BREAKING: The Bank of England governor-designate, Andrew Bailey, says those holding bitcoin should "be prepared to lose all of your money" and "bitcoin has not caught on much"
ok banker pic.twitter.com/eu4bolovWf
— Blockfolio (@blockfolio) March 4, 2020
Make No Mistake, Bitcoin Is Gaining Clout
Although the Bank of England’s incoming leader is skeptical of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, there are many prominent economists, technologists, and corporations that have begged to differ.
Case in point: Fidelity Investments — one of the world’s largest financial services firms — has launched a fully-fledged crypto division, offering Bitcoin custody and trade execution to its thousands of institutional clients. And the owner of the New York Stock Exchange has launched a crypto exchange called Bakkt.
On the West Coast, Microsoft — one of the world’s most well-known and most valuable companies — has embraced Bitcoin and similar technologies.
The tech giant on Wednesday joined hands with Ernst & Young and Ethereum development studio ConsenSys to use the Ethereum blockchain to connect the internals of companies for resource planning. This comes a few months after Microsoft began to use the Bitcoin blockchain to build a decentralized identity solution.
On the people side of things, there’s Elon Musk, who called the Bitcoin whitepaper “cool” and “brilliant,” along with Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey, who has branded the cryptocurrency as the most likely contender to become the “currency of the Internet” on multiple occasions.
So it seems that as with any revolutionary technology that may or may not succeed, there are people that believe it will and those that believe it won’t. But fortunately for believers in cryptocurrency, it seems that some of the world’s most prominent technologists and companies are sure this industry will succeed.
