At ** Berkshire Hathaway’s 2022 annual meeting**,
That is a remarkably strong rejection of an asset.
Yet one of Buffett’s most famous principles captures exactly how I think about owning Bitcoin.
** In his 1988 shareholder letter**, he wrote:
“Our favorite holding period is forever.”
The context matters. Buffett was discussing exceptional businesses with exceptional management. His willingness to hold depended on the quality of what he owned.
Applying that principle to Bitcoin takes an additional argument. A monetary network and a productive business are different things.
But the question at the heart of the principle travels well:
What could I own today that I would still be happy to own decades from now?
That question changes how you invest.
It certainly changes how I think about Bitcoin.
The U.S. government spends more on debt interest than on national defense. The era of independent central banking is over—welcome to the age of Fiscal Dominance.
Most of the financial world encourages us to look at the next announcement, the next earnings report, the next interest-rate decision, and the next asset that might double before everyone else notices.
There is always something happening. There is always someone explaining why you need to act immediately.
Then you step back and consider a different possibility.
Perhaps a few of your most consequential financial decisions will involve finding something exceptional, understanding it deeply, and giving it an extraordinary amount of time.
The buying might take a minute. The understanding could take years. The holding could take a lifetime.
Fifty years is a useful period to consider because it exposes how fragile dominance can be.
A company can appear untouchable while the conditions that made it successful are already disappearing. Its distribution advantage becomes obsolete. Its customers develop different habits. Its most profitable product becomes a feature inside someone else’s product.
Sometimes management fails to notice. Sometimes management notices and still cannot respond without damaging the existing business.
Success itself can make adaptation difficult.
That is the uncomfortable reality behind buying something forever: very few individual investments deserve that ambition.
A famous brand can deteriorate. A technological advantage can expire. A seemingly essential intermediary can become unnecessary.
Even a business that survives can deliver disappointing returns to someone who paid too much for it.
Longevity, quality, and investment performance are related. They are never interchangeable.
Before asking whether you can hold an asset forever, ask whether the asset deserves the commitment.
How a rocket company accidentally cornered AI’s scarcest resources: power, chips, and physical speed.
A spectacular chart provides very little help with the question of durability.
Historical compound annual growth rates tell you what happened between two dates. They can make a volatile journey look deceptively smooth. They also change dramatically depending on where you start measuring.
Bitcoin’s early returns were extraordinary. Building a serious investment thesis requires more than extending those returns into the future.
An asset cannot keep multiplying from a tiny starting point at the same rate indefinitely.
What matters to someone buying today is the relationship between the price paid, the risks taken, and the value that future users might place on ownership.
This is where the research becomes demanding.
What makes the asset useful?
What protects that usefulness?
Why would someone still want to own it after the excitement surrounding it has disappeared?
Those questions are harder than calculating a historical return. They are also more relevant to the money you have yet to make—or lose.
For me, they lead directly to Bitcoin’s moat.
A moat is an advantage that makes an asset or business difficult to displace.
In Bitcoin’s case, understanding that advantage requires getting past an obvious objection: its software can be copied.
