Dave Ramsey, the well-known financial advice radio personality, told listeners to his show that he agrees with Warren Buffett’s advice to completely avoid bitcoin.
In response to a question that suggested the cryptocurrency could be treated “the same way you would treat single stocks” because its market capitalization is more than $1 trillion, (according to Coinbase), Ramsey replied:
“It’s still thin air. Ask people like Warren Buffett, who says if he doubled the amount he had put in bitcoin, he would still have zero, because that’s the amount he’s put in bitcoin.
“I’m going with Warren on this one.”
Dave Ramsey celebrates 25 years on the air during an appearance at the Sirius XM Nashville studios in 2017. Anna Webber/Getty Images for SiriusXM
“Someday it may level out and become a thing, but … it’s not there. It’s not there. I wouldn’t wish a bitcoin investment on somebody I really dislike… I don’t even want those people to lose money.”
While I’m not familiar with a ‘double zero is still zero’ quotation from Buffett, both men have been critical of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies for many years.
In a 2014 clip from his radio show, Ramsey predicted that bitcoin buyers would “lose their money” and shouldn’t have invested in “a made-up computer game” with “no backing.”
“It’s the wild, wild West. It’s going to turn on its head and you’re going to lose your butt.”
In 2018, he called bitcoin “rat poison squared,” and told CNBC, “In terms of cryptocurrencies, generally, I can say with almost certainty that they will come to a bad ending.”
So far, the bad ending has not arrived.
Proponents argue that over the roughly 10 years that skeptics like Buffett and Ramsey have criticized bitcoin, its price has increased by more than 11,000%, although it has had a lot of ups and downs along the way.
