Venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya has countered billionaire Warren Buffett’s recent derogatory statements on bitcoin, stating that the cryptocurrency is “important.”
His comments come after Buffett, the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, argued that bitcoin is more of a gamble than an investment at the end of April, and then, last weekend at a shareholders’ meeting, he said bitcoin is “probably rat poison squared.”
While calling himself a Buffett “disciple,” Palihapitiya told CNBC that Buffett is wrong about bitcoin.
“Not everybody is right all the time,” he told the news source, further suggesting that that knowledge about technology is not in Buffett’s “circle of competence.”
Palihapitiya, a former Facebook and AOL executive, went on to push for the cryptocurrency’s benefits, saying it is a replacement to gold and:
“Something like bitcoin is really important, because it is not correlated to the rest of the market.”
Speaking about the financial crisis, he said that “things that we thought were hedges went away” and “broke down.” Bitcoin is viewed as providing a hedge to traditional finance by those who have owned the digital currency, he said.
Chamath Palihapitiya image via JD Lasica/Flickr