Authored by Andrea Bianconi via CoinTelegraph.com,
There has been a time when a saying was popular on Wall Street: “when Warren Buffett speaks, you listen.” Now Wall Street is better not to listen, if they do not want to become history faster than Kodak or Blockbuster.
The media are going mad reporting the latest senseless rants from Warren Buffett, Munger and Bill Gates, just to name the last few. The usual barrage of senseless observations, wrong assumptions, popular, but wrong and ignorant distinctions between "the technology behind Bitcoin" - which is good and everyone on the Street loves it - and the rest which is obviously very bad or just plain insults to the whole crypto community - as if instead Wall Street is populated only by honourable gentlemen and philanthropists.
Shall the crypto community start trading insults with them? Shall we respond?
image courtesy of CoinTelegraph
No we shall not. For they are slowly becoming the past at an accelerating pace and they do not understand it. Besides, they know nothing about Bitcoin. It is like asking a rugby player to dance the ballet's classic "pas des deux". It is pretty unlikely that the player will know how to dance the ballet.
It is worth repeating again and again what Bitcoin is (with capital "B" the protocol), what bitcoin is (with "b" the money), that Bitcoin was the first ever Blockchain, that it is today the largest, open, peer to peer system of payment without intermediaries and without central point of failure, that it incorporates "a planetary scale, self evident, thermodynamically guaranteed system of trust and immutability", that it is tamper and censorship resistant, that it is resistant to geopolitical manipulation, that lives by consensus and has the features of money and that all this extraordinary complexity put together will change the world we live in and will be the backbone of this coming digital or 4th industrial revolution? No, these are words wasted on them, because they represent the establishment and they are either too much ingrained in the current system to be able to see something different coming or they have too much vested interest in it to be able to acknowledge it.
They prosper in a system which is based on custody, control, intermediary chains, oversight, cronyism, centralized trust and manipulation. Bitcoin has none. Bitcoin is an alien to them.
The last time that Warren Buffett made very serious money has been with the financial crisis in 2007-2008. When millions of people lost their lifesavings and the hope for a decent future life he made more than $10 bln. By its own admission, this is not because he is a great investor:
"If I didn't think the government was going to act, I would not be doing anything this week. I am, to some extent, betting on the fact that the government will do the rational...