You’ve got to admit it’s weird though right, that every application of crypto turns out to be fraud and everyone involved in it ends up in jail? Of course it could just be a coincidence.

You could say the first forms of crypto currency was when kings started minting coins with their faces on them to determine what was rreal money and what wasn't. Of course they would never of dreamed of doing it to enrich themselves from everyone elses transactions.

At least those still had precious metal. How about when they went off the gold standard, meaning the only thing making your paper or inexpensive metal worth more than its material value is the threat of violence for not accepting it as payment?

I have to take issue with that. People continued to use fiat currency because it's useful. We didn't start using sovereigns instead. We still continue to use it for the same reason even after devaluations from $4 to the £ at the time down to more or less parity.

It's amazing how much of their tomorrow people will trade for a comfortable today. If my house were suddenly stolen by an entity and replaced with a tent, my sleeping in the tent would not constitute acceptance of it being the best living solution or tacit support of said entity.

It's a bit like the early days of automobiles. No journalist sees the need to report on every accident involving a horse but when one of these newfangled cars hits a lamppost, it's more novel. On the topic of transportation, bicycles were once regarded as sinful because they could enable women to travel and neglect their womanly duties, instead doing things like educating themselves about the world.

Also, I lost the pool. I had Ponzi on my bet for the first crypto top level comment, followed by fraud, then drug dealing.

“It's a bit like the early days of bicycles”or…”.it’s a bit like the early days of pneumatic transport tubes for humans” (a real thing!). 99% of new ideas are stupid. 1% are genius. What makes yours in the genius category?

Sorry, I didn't mean to suggest the novelty makes something automatically better, only that the novelty of it makes it of more interest to journalists, skewing the frequency reporting and moral panics.

Only time will tell, honestly. Bitcoin adoption is continually growing though, going for its 14th year, very hush hush in the shadows of the crypto circus, eaten by the media like cupcakes :)

... he's never exercised regularly "except when the Army Air Corps made me do exercise...for the first 99 years I've gotten by without doing any exercise at all," he added, and when prompted said he has no plans to change that.

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“I get my exercise being a pallbearer for those of my friends who believed in regular running and calisthenics.” --Sir Winston Churchill

There was a Channel 4 programme about risk, presented by the "Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk", David Spiegelhalter.

He said that the statistical increase in life expectancy with increased exercise was exactly equal to the amount of time spent exercising, if you did the optimal amount of exercise, and less if you did more or less than the optiomal amount, which I think was 1 hr per day. So 1 hr per day for 50 years netted an increase of about 2 years in life expectancy.

The comment he made was do it if you enjoy it, because all that extra life would be spent doing something you hate if you don't.

My ambition is just to stay half fit.

but the problem is finding out which half.

When did Berkshire Hathaway ever make anything?

Or are they just trading off the expertise and resourcefulness of others? Surely not!

That would hole the old guy's tirade against derivative currencies below the waterline.

...Is why we still teach Aristotle to those willing to learn.

"I have gained this from The Love of Wisdom: That I do without being commanded what others will only do for fear of the Law."

I recently read 'Intelligent Investor' with the additional updates from the early 2000s. 1930s rhymed with the 1960s rhymed with the dot.com boom. A new update would just include crypto as the latest fad.

There's nothing new!

Money is nothing more than a promise to exchange something now for something of equivalent value later. It’s just a token which permits deferred barter.

On that basis it seems to me that cryptocurrency is no less valid than any other currency. That said…

Cryptocurrency is a bloody disaster for the environment. I know that there are efforts to make it less of a horror show, but they don’t seem to have amounted to much so far. We need to be finding ways of using less energy, not more, and anything which increases our energy usage must be discouraged.

We should encourage as much energy use as possible while the hippies are trying to destroy our way of life.

I don't mine crypto so I will be doing my bit by driving my large engined car more aggressively.

Money is nothing more than a promise to exchange something now for something of equivalent value later. It’s just a token which permits deferred barter.

On that basis it seems to me that cryptocurrency is no less valid than any other currency.

Money is indeed nothing more than a promise to exchange something now for something of equivalent value later. Typically with the value backed by the continued existence of a nation state; so as long as the nation state exists then most of the value will still exist.

Cryptocurrency is a promise to exchange something now which may, or may not have any value later. It's a ponzi scheme with the people being bought onboard with new money typically doing so through paying extortion money to get cryptolocked files back, or people doing money laundering. If FTX is any indication of the monumental unregulated mess of crypto then the crypto "banks" are run by scamming criminals.

The entire thing can (and probably will) fall apart under it's own weight and i'm really not sure as to why anybody thinks that it's a good idea.

> "there isn't any crypto in China"

Well done, mate. Were all your investments this well informed?

But there aren't any crypto in China. Except the ones that are explicitly allowed. And the ones that aren't allowed but still traded.

He's almost right...

It seems that China bans cryptocurrency, lets the price fall, then allows it again so they can buy it cheaply. After the price rises they sell up and ban it again. Classic pump&dump.

"When did Berkshire Hathaway ever make anything?

It makes...wait for it...money.

But literally making money is discouraged by the existing monopoly money-makers.

No, they make their money by taxing the money they allow us to make. As long as we don't make enough to challenge their cartel.

He might be right about semiconductors being a capital intensive industry, but he seems to have missed the bit about them being a key strategic industry for every country on the planet. No semiconductors and the world economy falls apart.

The diversification away from just relying on TSMC in Taiwan is not just because of the threat from China, but also due to the other disruptions to global supply chains that have shown there's a massive weakness in this area. Semiconductors are a necessity, and countries need to treat them as such.

Which means, ultimately, semiconductor manufacturers should be a fairly safe bet. Maybe not Intel and AMD with their consumer focused stuff, but fabs like TSMC are a good bet - they're always going to be earning themselves a profit.

AMD aren't a manufacturer any more. They spun off their manufacturing division as Global Foundries about 14 years ago.

Crypto != blockchain

in much the same way that currency != metal mining (or paper production)

If you understand blockchain, you wouldn't touch crypto with bargepole.

He hates crypto, ok, but I wonder what's his opinion on CBDCs?