Article published on January 12, 2015
Warren Buffet Slams Bitcoin - Consequences for Bitcoin Casinos?
By: Harper Whitefield
Several Bitcoin casinos have popped up over the past year, but Warren Buffet warns against investing in this crypto-currency.
One of the major new technologies over the past 24 months has been Bitcoin, a virtual currency that allows users to make anonymous transactions. While several online casinos have started accepting it, its value still fluctuates wildly. This has led Warren Buffet to speak out against investing in Bitcoin, and it's likely worth it to pay attention to one of the wealthiest people alive.
The premise of Buffet's concerns is that he sees Bitcoin as being a vehicle for transferring money. He's even made an analogy to other forms of transferring funds like money orders and paper checks saying that investing in Bitcoin makes as much sense as investing in money orders. While some people believe that Bitcoin will be the next coming of the technological revolution, Buffet believes it's just a fad that will fade away as time goes on. In short, he doesn't believe Bitcoin has much value outside of people using it to transfer funds.
With that having been said, a number of Bitcoin casinos are running now, and a collapse of Bitcoin could spell disaster for people who have a hefty account balance at one of these sites. This is one of the inherent problems with using Bitcoin to play at online casinos: It's often more of a gamble having the currency in the first place as it is playing the games that are offered at the site. Because of this, it takes a certain tolerance for risk and an inherent investment in Bitcoin to even own them at this point.
While we hope that Bitcoin turns out well as much as anybody, the fact of the matter is that it's extremely unstable right now. It could be worth $250 one week and $750 the next before dropping back down to $300 the week after that. Bitcoin does have a number of extremely interesting benefits like the ability to make anonymous transactions, but that isn't going to mean much until the value becomes more stable and players can be fairly certain that wins in the casino won't be wiped out by losses in the value of the currency.
