Munger said he hated bitcoin’s success.

Charlie Munger, a legendary investor, and Warren Buffett’s right-hand man lampooned bitcoin at Berkshire Hathaway’s (NYSE: BRK.A) annual meeting on Saturday. On a Q&A session, the company’s 97-year old Vice Chairman fired a salvo of negative comments against the leading cryptocurrency. (Bitcoin.com)

Currency for the low-life?

While bitcoin has been on a dream run over the past year, Munger appeared to be unimpressed with its performance.

“Of course I hate the bitcoin success,” he commented. “I don’t welcome a currency that’s so useful to kidnappers and extortionists and so forth, nor do I like just shuffling out of your extra billions of billions of dollars to somebody who just invented a new financial product out of thin air.”

Munger, who is also a billionaire, added: “I think I should say modestly that the whole damn development is disgusting and contrary to the interests of civilization.”

“And I’ll leave the criticism to others,” he remarked.

Bitcoin currently has a market capitalization of little less than $1 trillion and is trading around $58,000 from less than $5,000 more than a year ago.

Several large, listed corporates such as Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) and MicroStrategy (NASDAQ: MSTR) have invested billions of dollars of their corporate reserves in bitcoin in a flight from the depreciation in the purchasing power of the dollar.

On the flip side, investors have lost billions of dollars in incidents such as the recent collapse of crypto exchanges in Turkey.

Buffett’s reaction to Munger’s diatribe against bitcoin?

“I am alright on that one,” he said, using a line that a former governor of Nebraska was fond of saying.

Buffett added humorously:  “We probably got hundreds of thousands of people watching that own bitcoin, and we probably have two people that are short. So we got a choice of making 400,000 people mad at us and unhappy…or making two people happy, and that’s just a dumb equation.”

Related Story:  TIME Magazine To Hold Bitcoin On Its Balance Sheet

Image of Charlie Munger: Wikimedia