Warren Buffett was sure: Bitcoin will not last long. Already a few years ago, the US television station CNBC asked him about the crypt diet. “Stay away from it. It’s a mirage basically,” said the billionaire 2014. It’s a method of transmitting money. It’s a very effective way of transmitting money and you can do it anonymously and all that. A check is a way of transmitting money too. Are checks worth a whole lot of money? Just because they can transmit money?”
Nevertheless, he had hopes that Bitcoin could improve the financial world. “I hope bitcoin becomes a better way to do it. But you can replicate it a bunch of different ways.”
At the very least, Buffett was of the opinion that Bitcoin was overvalued. “The idea that it [bitcoin] has some huge intrinsic value is just a joke in my view.”
These statements are now three years old, and the value of Bitcoin has increased sevenfold since then. Was Buffett so wrong with the warning that one should leave his fingers off the crypto currency? In one point he was right: The principle of bitcoin is relatively easy to build. In the past few years, the alternatives to bitcoin have become increasingly important.
Does the value of Bitcoin currently trigger a hype, or is the big value only a hype? Second, computer scientist Adi Shamir also believes in the basic cryptographic principle for bitcoin technology. “As an investment vehicle, Bitcoin will have very high volatility, and there will be frequent speculative bubbles,” he said recently in Vienna.
His detailed research in the field has shown that many Bitcoin owners had never carried out transactions with the digital currency. At the same time, the basic idea was that crypto currency will serve primarily as a method of payment.
However, three quarters of Bitcoin owners would only consider the currency as a speculative object. “The people invest because they believe that other people will buy them later for a higher price,” said the crypto expert.
As a result, Bitcoin does not function as planned as a currency, but rather solves a snowball system: it is only as long as the number of participants grows and money is still pumped into the system. If this is not the case anymore, the entire system could collapse. Only the founders of the crypto currency are rich according to the theory of Shamir – the rest loses money.
The expert states a date for the end of the bitcoin: As currently about 16 million Bitcoin are in circulation, but the upper limit is set to 21 million, the end of the Bitcoin creation will be reached near 2040, according to the calculations.
http://financialqz.com/2017/09/11/bitcoin-what-if-warren-buffetts-prediction-comes-true/