At Berkshire Hathaway’s 2018 annual shareholder meeting in Omaha, Liz Claman of Fox Business asked Warren Buffett whether bitcoin was still rat poison, given that the price had risen from a hundred dollars when he last said so to nine thousand at the time of asking. Buffett answered without hesitating. The catalog will not reproduce his full sentence. The relevant phrase was “rat poison squared.” Becky Quick of CNBC tweeted it within ten minutes. By the end of the day it was on a t-shirt.
The phrase was meant to land as compounding revulsion. Bitcoin was so bad that ordinary rat poison wouldn’t capture it; it had to be rat poison multiplied by itself. The mathematical metaphor backfired in a way Buffett did not see coming. Bitcoiners, who had been called every kind of name for nine years by then, recognized the shape of the joke immediately. Squaring rat poison does not make it more lethal to bitcoin; it makes it more lethal to whatever the rat is. If Buffett’s gold-and-cash portfolio was the rat, bitcoin being its poison was a structural compliment.
Within forty-eight hours, “rat poison squared” was on hats, mugs, hoodies, and Twitter bios. The Bitcoin Standard’s Saifedean Ammous adopted it as a recurring tagline. Memes set Buffett’s headshot against the bitcoin price, with the price labeled in increments of “squared rat poison doses, daily.” The community had absorbed the insult and reframed it so quickly that it functioned, by midweek, as a recruitment pitch.
What the artifact records is the inversion. Buffett held the view through the end of his active tenure. By early 2025, Berkshire Hathaway had disclosed exposure to bitcoin-adjacent positions through portfolio companies, and the trade press wrote variations of the headline “Buffett takes a sip of his own rat poison.” That headline had been written, in slightly different forms, since 2018. The community had been waiting.
The phrase is now over a half-decade into its second life. It has fully separated from Buffett’s intention and entered the bitcoin lexicon as a compliment to the asset, deployed by people who would never explain the joke to him.
We do not include this entry to settle who was right. We include it because the metabolic process — insult enters, gets adopted, gets inverted, becomes merch — is one of the catalog’s recurring structural facts. Bitcoin culture eats its critics this way often enough that it should be considered part of the design.