Warren Buffett Steps Down, Suggests Someone Invent Peer-To-Peer Electronic Cash System

OMAHA, NE — After stepping down as chairman of Berkshire Hathaway on Friday, 96-year-old billionaire Warren Buffett released a final 54-page shareholder letter warning that the collapse of fiat currency is mathematically inevitable unless someone manages to invent a decentralized, cryptographically secure peer-to-peer cash network.

Buffett, who famously referred to bitcoin as "rat poison squared," dedicated the vast majority of the missive to laying out the precise theoretical mechanics for what he termed an "unprecedented cryptographic ledger of immutable computational work."

"The natural course of any government is to debase its currency over time," Buffett wrote, explaining that the only viable salvation for the global economy would be a trustless system where distributed computers produce random numbers to verify blocks of transactions.

"I have sketched the fundamentals on some Dairy Queen napkins. I envision an absolute cap, perhaps 21 million notional "coins", issued on a halving schedule every four years to enforce digital scarcity.

"It is a pity no mathematician has yet conceived of such a thing."

Longtime Berkshire watchers were stunned by the chairman's breakthrough, which meticulously formulated the exact architecture of the Bitcoin whitepaper down to the difficulty adjustment algorithm, written entirely from first principles using an Underwood typewriter.

"Warren spent three pages explaining how a chain of digital signatures could eliminate the need for a central bank or financial intermediary," said Jacob Wright, a senior portfolio manager at Omaha Capital who attended the farewell briefing. "When a reporter asked him if he was essentially describing Bitcoin, he looked confused, warned everyone in the room that Bitcoin was a Ponzi scheme for charlatans, and returned to explaining his brilliant new concept of 'mining.'"

"I mean, 2018 is a long time ago... Maybe he forgot."

Buffett reportedly warned the board that humanity has only a narrow window to build the network before the US dollar is essentially worthless, suggesting that perhaps the project could be spearheaded by an anonymous programmer or team using a Japanese-sounding pseudonym.

"If Charlie were here, he would agree that our civilization requires a decentralized proof-of-work protocol immediately," Buffett concluded, before reminding shareholders that anyone buying existing cryptocurrencies is trading purely in delusions.

At press time, Buffett was reportedly working on a follow-up memorandum proposing a novel secondary layer of off-chain payment channels that could settle millions of transactions per second, which he tentatively named the "Thunderbolt System."