NEW YORK  - The $4.6 million that a blockchain developer just bid for lunch with Warren Buffett may be money well spent, for both sides. If Justin Sun can coax any hint of positivity towards digital currencies from the famously skeptical Berkshire Hathaway chairman, it could ignite the price of such assets. The sage of Omaha will get a fat check for his charity - such are the terms of the annual lunch auction - and a helpful tech tutorial.

Buffett doesn’t mince words about things he doesn’t like or understand, and cryptocurrencies count as both. He famously labeled bitcoin as “rat poison squared” and said the world’s largest digital money was driven by pure speculation.

Yet the octogenarian value investor acknowledges his technology ignorance has cost him dearly. Last month he called himself an “idiot” for not investing in online retailer Amazon years earlier than he did. He also recently said he’d been persuaded by people with more knowledge that the blockchain technology that underpins bitcoin was important.

Sun will presumably seek to convince Buffett further. His Tron Foundation, based in Beijing and San Francisco, raised $170 million in a 2017 initial coin offering and its Tron coin ranks as the 11th largest digital money with a market capitalization of $2.5 billion, according to CoinMarketCap.com. Last year the outfit acquired BitTorrent, a decentralized file-storage system and issuer of BTT tokens, another sizeable cryptocurrency.

It's undeniable that blockchain is becoming mainstream. JPMorgan and Microsoft are among those who have launched their own initiatives. But speculation is still rife: Bitcoin’s price has doubled in two months. The Berkshire boss is unlikely to emerge from his lunch ready to buy digital money, but lunch with Sun and his fellow crypto-pioneers may reduce the chances of another Amazon moment down the line.

On Twitter https://twitter.com/tombuerkle

 

CONTEXT NEWS

- Justin Sun, founder and chief executive of the blockchain developer Tron Foundation, said on June 3 he had won Warren Buffett’s 20th anniversary charity lunch with a bid of $4.6 million.

- It was a record amount for the lunch with the Berkshire Hathaway chair, which has raised over $34 million for the Glide Foundation, a San Francisco charity that serves the poor and homeless.

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(The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)

(Editing by John Foley and Katrina Hamlin) ((thomas.buerkle@thomsonreuters.com; Reuters Messaging: thomas.buerkle.thomsonreuters.com@reuters.net))