_ Bitcoin is going to ZERO _ - Warren Buffet WARNS !

$100,000. That's what one Bitcoin cost you today in November 2025. Some fellow called me last week asking if he should mortgage his house to buy 10 of them. Said his nephew made $3 million trading crypto and now drives a Lamborghini. Wanted to know if I thought Bitcoin would hit a million per coin like all the experts are predicting. I told him the same thing I'm going to tell you. The question isn't whether Bitcoin can reach a million dollars. Tulip bulbs once cost more than houses in Amsterdam. Pets.com stock went from $11 to $300 million in market cap before disappearing entirely. Prices can do anything when speculation takes hold. The real question, the only question that matters, is whether you'll still have your money when the music stops. Because in 75 years of investing, I've learned one immutable truth. When everyone at the party thinks they're a genius, someone's about to lose their shirt. I can make a better argument for Bitcoin hitting a million dollars than most of the people actually buying it. That's because most Bitcoin investors I've met can't explain why they own it beyond number go up and everyone's buying it. But the smart ones, and there are smart people on this side, they build a case that sounds pretty damn compelling if you don't look too closely. Michael Saylor put $60 billion of his company's money into Bitcoin. That's not pocket change. BlackRock, the biggest asset manager on earth, with $10 trillion under management, is now offering Bitcoin ETFs. These aren't reckless gamblers. So before I explain why I still wouldn't touch it, let me show you exactly what they're seeing that makes them so convinced. First off, there's the scarcity argument. Bitcoin is mathematically limited to 21 million coins. Period. No central bank can print more. No government can inflate it away. And with about 19.94 million already mined, we're approaching that ceiling fast. The bulls say this makes it better than gold. Because at least with gold, we can always dig up more if the price gets high enough. You find a big enough gold mine, you increase the supply. Can't do that with Bitcoin. Michael Saylor at MicroStrategy has bet his entire company on this thesis. His firm holds 582,000 Bitcoin, worth over $60 billion at current prices. He's out there saying Bitcoin either goes to zero or goes to a million. And he's putting his money where his mouth is. Standard Chartered Bank, not exactly a bunch of wild-eyed speculators, has forecast Bitcoin hitting $200,000 by end of 2025. Kathy Wood at ARK Invest, she's talking about Bitcoin reaching several million dollars within 5 to 10 years. Now here's where the argument gets interesting. These folks point to institutional adoption as a game changer. When I first started warning people about Bitcoin, it was mostly individual speculators trading it. Today, we've got BlackRock offering Bitcoin ETFs. Bitcoin ETFs now hold over 6% of the total Bitcoin supply. Fidelity is loving people put Bitcoin in their retirement accounts. Even El Salvador made it legal tender for crying out loud. The comparison they make is to the early internet. Remember the dot-com bubble? Sure, most of those companies went bust. But the internet itself, that changed everything. Amazon, Google, Apple. If you'd bought those at the peak of the bubble and held on, you'd be incredibly wealthy today. The Bitcoin bulls say we're at that same inflection point with cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. They point to something called DEFI, decentralized finance. The idea is that you can do banking, lending, trading, all without traditional financial institutions. Smart contracts on Ethereum execute automatically, without lawyers or banks. It's peer-to-peer lending on a global scale. They say this is going to revolutionize finance. The way the internet revolutionized information. Then there's the digital gold narrative. Gold has an $18 trillion market capitalization. It's been a store of value for thousands of years. But it's heavy, hard to transport, expensive to store and secure. Bitcoin, you can send a billion dollars worth across the world in minutes for a few dollars in fees. The bulls say if Bitcoin captures even a fraction of gold's market share as a store of value, we're looking at multi-hundred thousand or even million dollar prices per coin. The monetary policy argument is compelling too. Look at what governments did during COVID. They printed trillions of dollars. The M2 money supply in the United States exploded. When you have unlimited money printing by central banks around the world, people naturally look for something that can't be inflated away. Bitcoin's supply is fixed by mathematics, not by the whims of politicians or central bankers. And here's something that's hard to dismiss. Bitcoin has survived. It's been around since 2009. 16 years. It's survived hacks. It's survived government crackdowns in China. It's survived multiple 80% crashes. Every time the skeptics declare it dead, it comes back stronger. There have been 474 obituaries written for Bitcoin over the years. Yet here it is, trading above $100,000. That kind of persistence makes even a skeptic like me pause and wonder. The network effects are real too. Bitcoin has the most computing power securing its network. It has the highest liquidity. It has the brand recognition. When people think cryptocurrency, they think Bitcoin first. In technology, the winner often takes most of the market. Think Microsoft with operating systems. Or Google with search. Maybe Bitcoin becomes that dominant winner in digital money. Robert Kiyosaki, who wrote Rich Dad Poor Dad, is predicting $500,000 by next year. Tom Lee at Fundstrat sees similar numbers. These aren't nobody shouting in the dark. These are people with significant followings and real money on the line. And honestly, the mathematics of scarcity combined with increasing demand does create a compelling case for price appreciation. If demand keeps growing and supply is capped, basic economics says price has to rise. Every four years, Bitcoin goes through something called a halving, where the mining rewards get cut in half. This reduces the new supply coming into the market. Historically, prices have surged in the 12 to 18 months following these halvings. The most recent halving happened in 2024, which means we might be in the sweet spot for the next bull run right now. I'll give the Bitcoin bulls this much. They're not just making things up. There are real developments, real institutional money flowing in, real technological innovations happening in this space. The question isn't whether blockchain technology might be revolutionary. It probably will be. The question is whether Bitcoin specifically is a good investment at $100,000 per coin. Stop me if you've heard this one. I'm investing in Bitcoin. No, you're not. You're speculating. And I don't say that to be condescending. I say it because the difference between those two words represents the difference between building wealth and gambling it away. Most people don't know the difference anymore. And that ignorance is going to cost a generation of investors everything they've saved. Let me ask you a question, and I want you to really think about it. If you bought Bitcoin today, and I told you that you couldn't sell it for 20 years, couldn't trade it, couldn't cash out, couldn't do anything with it, would you still buy it? Your gut reaction to that question tells you everything you need to know about whether you're investing or speculating. When I buy a stock in a company, I'm buying a piece of a business. That business has assets, factories, equipment, patents, brands. It employs people who go to work every day creating products or services that other people want to buy. The business generates revenue, and if it's run well, it generates profits. Those profits can be reinvested to grow the business, or they can be returned to shareholders as dividends. The beauty of productive assets is that they compound. If I buy a farm, that farm produces crops every year. I can sell those crops for money. I can use that money to buy more land, better equipment, more efficient irrigation. Each year the farm becomes more valuable, not because someone else is willing to pay more for it, but because it produces more output. The intrinsic value increases. Charlie Munger, my late business partner, and boy do I miss him, used to explain this beautifully. Would you rather own a goose that lays golden eggs, or would you rather own something that you hope to sell to someone else for more than you paid? That's the difference between investing and speculation. Let me give you a concrete example. I bought my first stock when I was 11 years old. It was Citi's Service Preferred. It cost me $38 a share. Now, was I buying it because I hoped some greater fool would pay me $50? No. I was buying it because the company was paying dividends, and I calculated that those dividends, reinvested over time, would make me money. That's investing. Or take Berkshire Hathaway's investment in Coca-Cola. We bought that in 1988. Why? Because Coca-Cola produces a product that billions of people want to consume. It has incredible brand value. It generates consistent cash flow year after year. Every year, people drink more Coca-Cola, and the company makes more profit. We're collecting hundreds of millions in dividends from that investment. That's a productive asset. Now, let's talk about Bitcoin. What does Bitcoin produce? Nothing. Zero. It sits there. It doesn't manufacture anything. It doesn't provide a service. It doesn't innovate. It doesn't employ workers creating value. You buy Bitcoin today for $100,000, and you're hoping that tomorrow, next month, or next year, someone will pay you $110,000, or $200,000, or a million dollars for it. But the Bitcoin itself hasn't generated a penny of value in the interim. This is what I tried to explain back at our 2022 shareholder meeting when I said I wouldn't pay $25 for all the Bitcoin in the world. People misunderstood that. They thought I was saying Bitcoin would go to zero. That's not what I meant. What I meant was, what would I do with it? I'd have to sell it back to you to realize any value, because the Bitcoin itself doesn't produce anything. Compare that to farmland. If you offered me 1% of all the farmland in the United States for $25 billion, I'd write you a check this afternoon. Why? Because that farmland is going to produce corn, soybeans, wheat, valuable crops that people need to eat. Every single year, I'm getting output that has value. The land isn't just sitting there. It's working for me. Or apartments. If you own an apartment building, tenants pay you rent every month. That's cash flow. You can use that cash flow to maintain the building, pay your mortgage, and pocket the rest. The building is producing income. That's what makes it an investment, rather than speculation. Gold has the same problem as Bitcoin, and I've been consistent about this for decades. Gold has some industrial uses, sure. But mostly people buy gold, hoping to sell it to someone else later for more money. If you took all the gold ever mined and melted it into a cube, it would be about 68 feet on each side. You could fit it in a baseball infield. At current prices, that cube is worth something like $18 trillion. Now, for that same $18 trillion, you could buy all the farmland in the United States, that's about 400 million acres, producing actual food, plus 16 Exxon mobiles, and you'd still have about a trillion dollars left over for walking around money. A century from now, the farmland will have produced enormous amounts of crops. ExxonMobil will have generated trillions in dividends and profits. And that gold cube? It'll be sitting there, exactly the same size, having produced nothing. Which would you rather own? Bitcoin is gold with a better marketing campaign. At least gold has been a recognized store of value for thousands of years. It's pretty, you can make jewelry out of it, and it doesn't corrode. Bitcoin is ones and zeros in a computer. The only reason it has value is because we collectively agree it has value. That's not intrinsic value, that's psychological value. I hear the counter-argument, but warn the dollars the same way. It's just paper that we collectively agree has value. True enough. But here's the critical difference. The United States government accepts dollars for taxes. It pays its employees in dollars. You can use dollars to settle any debt, public or private, because it's backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government. Like it or not, that's a form of utility that creates baseline demand for dollars. Bitcoin has no such backing. No government is required to accept it. No business is required to take it. Its value is purely based on the next person in line being willing to pay more than you did. That's the definition of speculation, not investment. Now the Bitcoin folks will say, but Warren, what about the technology? What about blockchain? And look, I'm not saying blockchain technology isn't interesting. It might very well revolutionize all sorts of things. Supply chains, medical records, property titles, you name it. But here's the thing. You don't need to own Bitcoin to benefit from blockchain technology. That's like saying you needed to own domain names to benefit from the internet. Most of those domain speculators lost everything. The real money was made by companies that used internet technology to deliver better products and services. Amazon, Google, Netflix. The same will be true with blockchain. The winners will be the companies that use this technology to improve their business models and deliver more value to customers. Maybe that's banks using blockchain to settle transactions faster. Maybe it's logistics companies tracking shipments more efficiently. Maybe it's healthcare companies managing patient records more securely. But owning Bitcoin doesn't give you exposure to those innovations. It just gives you exposure to, well, to Bitcoin's price going up or down based on sentiment. Here's another way to think about it. Let's say Bitcoin does hit a million dollars. That would give it a market cap of roughly 20 trillion dollars. Assuming all 21 million coins are eventually mined, that's bigger than the entire GDP of the United States. For what? For a digital ledger that processes about seven transactions per second. These have processes 65,000 transactions per second. The practical utility doesn't justify anywhere near that valuation. The Bitcoin enthusiasts talk about network effects and first mover advantage. Fine. MySpace had first mover advantage in social networking. Where is it now? Blackberry dominated smartphones before iPhone came along. Being first doesn't guarantee you'll be the winner. Especially in technology where things move fast. And here's what really concerns me. The people buying Bitcoin today at $100,000 largely don't understand what they're buying. They're buying it because they've seen it go up. They're buying it because their neighbor made money on it. They're buying it because some celebrity endorsed it. Or because they're afraid of missing out. That's not investing. That's gambling. And in my experience, when you're gambling with money you can't afford to lose, bad things happen. January 21st, 1980. I'm sitting in my office in Omaha watching the news and gold has just hit $850 an ounce. The phone won't stop ringing. Everyone wants to know if they should buy more. It's going to $5,000, they tell me. The dollar is finished. Gold is the only real money. I heard the same certainty in their voices then that I hear when people talk about Bitcoin going to a million today. You know where gold went next? It collapsed 65% and didn't see $850 again for 28 years. The people calling me in 1980 lost fortunes. Not because they were stupid. But because they confused a popular narrative with investment logic. And here's the thing that should terrify anyone holding Bitcoin right now. Those gold buyers had better reasons than you do. I remember this vividly. Serious people, not fringe characters, but respected investors, were saying gold was the only safe place to put your money. And you know what happened? Gold promptly lost 65% of its value over the next two years. It took 28 years for gold to get back to that 1980 peak. 28 years. If you'd bought at the top and held, you made nothing for nearly three decades, not adjusting for inflation. And in real inflation-adjusted terms, you lost a fortune. Meanwhile, if you'd put that same money into the S&P 500 in 1980, you'd have multiplied your money 13 times over by 2008. Or you could have bought farmland, collected rent, watched it depreciate, and done even better. The people who chased gold because they were scared lost out on one of the greatest bull markets in American history. The parallels to Bitcoin are eerie. People are scared about inflation. They're worried about government money printing. They want something that seems safe from manipulation. I understand the psychology. But the prescription is wrong. You don't protect yourself from inflation by buying non-productive assets that might crash 80%. You protect yourself by owning pieces of productive businesses that can raise their prices with inflation and maintain their earning power. Or let's talk about the dot-com bubble, since Bitcoin bulls love to compare themselves to the early internet. Yes, the internet turned out to be revolutionary. But you know what? Most internet stocks still went to zero. In March 2000, the Nasdaq peaked at $5,048. By October 2002, it had fallen to $1,114. That's a 78% decline. Companies that had been worth billions became worthless overnight. Pets.com spent $300 million on a Super Bowl ad and went bankrupt nine months later. Webvan raised $375 million in its IPO and was liquidated within two years. Etoys was valued at $8 billion at its peak and went bankrupt with its domain name selling for $3.6 million. The vast majority of people who invested in internet stocks during the bubble lost everything. But here's the kicker. Even if you'd had perfect foresight and knew which companies would survive, you still could have lost money by paying too much. Cisco was a great company, one of the survivors. But if you bought Cisco stock at the peak in 2000, it took you 17 years just to break even. Amazon dropped 95% from its peak. It eventually became one of the most valuable companies on earth. But only if you had the stomach to hold through a 95% loss. This is what the Bitcoin bulls miss when they make the internet comparison. Yeah, maybe blockchain will be important. Maybe Bitcoin survives. But that doesn't mean buying it at $100,000 is a good idea. You can be right about the technology and still lose all your money by paying too much. And let's talk about the granddaddy of all bubbles, Tulipmania in Holland in the 1630s. Now historians debate how widespread this actually was, but the basic facts are clear. Tulip bulb prices went absolutely crazy. At the peak, a single bulb could cost more than a house. People were trading their farms, their businesses, everything they owned for tulip bulbs. And it was all based on the idea that someone else would pay even more tomorrow than you paid today. What were people's justifications? Tulips were beautiful. They were exotic, imported from Turkey. They had genuine aesthetic value. Owning rare tulips was a status symbol among the wealthy. The rare varieties were truly scarce. You couldn't just plant more of them overnight. Sound familiar? These are the same justifications people use for Bitcoin. It's beautiful in a digital way. It's exotic. Cryptography. It's a status symbol. Look how tech savvy I am. And it's truly scarce. Only 21 million ever. You know what happened to tulip bulbs? The bubble popped. Prices collapsed. The rare tulips that had been worth more than houses became worthless. And tulips themselves, they're still around. You can buy them at any garden store for a few bucks. They're nice flowers. But they're not an investment. Here's what I've learned watching bubbles over my lifetime. They all have certain characteristics in common. First, there's a grain of truth in the story. The internet really was revolutionary. Houses really were in limited supply in desirable areas before 2008. There really is something interesting about blockchain technology. Second, prices rise fast enough that early adopters make quick money. This creates powerful FOMO. Fear of missing out. Your brother-in-law bought Bitcoin at $10 and sold at $1,000. Your co-worker put $1,000 in and now it's worth $1,000. $20,000. You start feeling stupid for not buying earlier. So you jump in late. Third, there are seemingly sophisticated justifications for why this time is different. With the dot-com bubble, it was network effects and eyeballs and new economy thinking. With housing in 2006, it was they're not making any more land. And location, location, location. With Bitcoin, it's blockchain technology and decentralized finance and sound money. Fourth, traditional metrics stop mattering. In the dot-com bubble, people said P slash E ratios were outdated. In housing, people said price to rent ratios didn't matter anymore. With Bitcoin, people say concepts like earnings and cash flow are irrelevant. Because it's a store of value. When people start saying the old rules don't apply, that's your signal that we're in bubble territory. Fifth, and most importantly, the bubble always pops. Always. There has never been an exception in all of financial history. Prices that rose based on pure speculation, disconnected from any underlying productivity or cash flow, eventually fall back to earth. The only question is when and how far. Right now, Bitcoin is exhibiting all five characteristics. We've got the grain of truth. Blockchain is interesting. We've got the early adopters making quick money. All those stories of Bitcoin millionaires. We've got sophisticated sounding justifications. Digital gold. Hedge against inflation. Institutional adoption. We've got traditional metrics being dismissed as irrelevant. Who cares about cash flow from something that's digital gold? The only question is whether the pop has already happened or is still coming. Bitcoin's crashed before. In 2017, it went from under $1,000 to $20,000 in a year. Then crashed 84% to $3,200. People who bought near the top in December 2017 had to wait three years just to break even. In 2021, it hit $69,000, then dropped 77% to under $16,000. That's not volatility. That's Russian roulette. And the people pushing it now at $100,000 are saying, this time it's different because institutions are involved. That's what they always say. You know what institutions bring to the table? More sophisticated ways to lose money. The 2008 financial crisis was caused by institutions. Banks, insurance companies, ratings agencies, all convincing themselves that housing prices couldn't fall nationwide. Institutions aren't smarter than individual investors. They're just better at creating complex justifications for foolish behavior. And here's the really scary part. Bitcoin at $100,000 is much riskier than Bitcoin was at $100. At $100, you were buying a wild speculation that might go to zero or might go up 1,000 times. The risk reward was asymmetric in an interesting way. At $100,000, you're buying something that would need to go to a million for a 10 times return, which the bulls insist is inevitable, but could still go to zero or drop 80% like it has twice before. The risk reward now is terrible. You're risking most of your capital for the possibility of tripling or quadrupling your money if you time the peak perfectly. Let me tell you something I learned from Benjamin Graham, my teacher. The three most important words in investing are margin of safety. You want to buy things for less than they're worth. So even if you're wrong about your analysis, you still have a cushion. What's the margin of safety in Bitcoin at $100,000? There isn't one. You're paying full speculation price and hoping someone will pay you even more tomorrow. Here's the question keeping you up at night. What if I'm wrong? What if Bitcoin does go to a million and you miss out on life-changing money because you listened to some 95-year-old guy in Omaha who doesn't understand technology? I get it. I felt that fear of missing out myself many times over the years. It's a powerful emotion and it's designed by evolution to keep you from being left behind by your tribe. But let me tell you what I've learned about that feeling. Every single time I've acted on it, I've regretted it. And every single time I've ignored it and stuck to my principles, I've been glad I did. If you buy Bitcoin today at $100,000 and it goes to a million in five years, you'll have made 10 times your money. Sounds great, right? But here's what you're not calculating. The opportunity cost and the risk. What else could you have done with that money? If you put it into a diversified portfolio of high-quality businesses, you'd probably make 8% to 10% per year with much, much lower risk. Over five years at 10% annual returns, you'd double your money. Not as exciting as 10 times, sure, but you'd sleep well at night. More importantly, those businesses would be generating cash flow the entire time. Dividends would be rolling in. The companies would be reinvesting in growth, hiring people, innovating, creating value. Your wealth would be tied to actual economic production, not to whether the next buyer of Bitcoin is more enthusiastic than you are. And what if Bitcoin doesn't go to a million? What if it goes the other way? I can't tell you how many times over my career, I've seen people risk money they couldn't afford to lose on something that seemed like a sure thing. The consequences are devastating. People lose their retirement savings. They can't send their kids to college. They delay retirement by a decade or more, all because they gaveled on something they didn't truly understand. Here's a thought experiment I'd like you to consider. Imagine you have $100,000 to invest. You've got two choices. Choice A, buy one Bitcoin. Over the next 10 years, it either goes to a million dollars or it goes to zero. Nobody knows which, but either way, that Bitcoin won't produce a penny of income during those 10 years. It just sits in your digital wallet, waiting for you to find someone willing to buy it. Choice B, buy a diversified portfolio of businesses. Maybe you buy stakes in Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, Berkshire Hathaway, and a few other solid companies with proven business models. Over those same 10 years, you collect dividends every quarter. Those companies grow their earnings. They launch new products. They expand into new markets. Some might stumble, but others will thrive. And at the end, you'll almost certainly have more money than you started with because you own productive assets. Which choice gives you better odds of building lasting wealth? Which choice lets you sleep well at night? Which choice doesn't require you to become an expert in cryptography or blockchain technology or market timing? Which choice doesn't require you to constantly watch prices and worry about whether you should sell now or hold for higher prices? The Bitcoin narrative requires everything to go right. Continued adoption. No serious technical flaws being discovered. No government crackdowns. Continued enthusiasm from new buyers willing to pay higher and higher prices. The productive assets narrative just requires what's been true for centuries. People will keep needing toothpaste and diapers and soft drinks and healthcare. I've been investing for over 70 years now. I've seen schemes and manias come and go. And here's what I've learned. The boring stuff works. The flashy stuff usually doesn't. Buying great businesses at fair prices and holding them for a long time works. Chasing the hot new thing rarely does. Will I look foolish if Bitcoin goes to a million dollars? Maybe. But I've been called foolish before. I didn't buy dot-com stocks in 1999. And people called me an old man who didn't understand the new economy. I didn't buy gold in 2011 when everyone said it was going to $5,000. I didn't buy real estate in 2006 when people said housing only goes up. And you know what? I slept just fine while those bubbles inflated and popped. The goal of investing isn't to maximize your returns at any cost. It's to grow your wealth steadily over time without taking risks that could wipe you out. It's to compound your money year after year in a way that's sustainable and based on genuine economic value creation, not speculation. Bitcoin might make some people rich. But it will make far more people poor. And I can tell you with certainty, nobody ever went broke taking profits in a bubble. And nobody ever went broke avoiding something they didn't understand. You want to know the real difference between me and the Bitcoin millionaires? I sleep like a baby every night. My wealth isn't dependent on the next buyer being more enthusiastic than I am. It's built on businesses that make products people need year after year, decade after decade. Boring? Absolutely. But boring is beautiful when you're 70, 80, 90 years old. And you never have to worry about money. That fellow who called me about mortgaging his house for Bitcoin, I told him to take his nephew out for a nice steak dinner, congratulate him on his luck, and then forget everything the kid said about investing. Because luck and skill look identical in a bull market. And the only way to tell the difference is to wait for the tide to go out. When it does, we'll see who's been swimming naked. I can promise you one thing. It won't be me.