Charlie Munger wishes cryptos had never been invented, says China made correct decision to ban them

Warren Buffett’s longtime business partner and billionaire investor Charlie Munger’s contempt for cryptocurrencies seems to be rock solid as he once again made a scathing attack on the rise of cryptocurrencies while applauding China’s decision to ban them. Calling crypto boom “insane”, Munger said, “I’m never going to buy a cryptocurrency. I wish they’d never been invented,” The Sydney Morning Herald reported. Munger was addressing Australian investors at the Sohn Hearts and Minds Investment conference in Sydney.

“I think the Chinese made the correct decision, which is to simply ban them. My country – English-speaking civilisation – has made the wrong decision,” Munger.

The worldwide crypto adoption had jumped over 880 per cent in the past year with peer-to-peer platforms driving cryptocurrency usage in emerging markets, according to Chainalysis. While the Indian market grew 641 per cent over the past year, large institutional-sized transfers above $10 million worth of cryptocurrency represented 42 per cent of transactions sent from India-based addresses, versus 28 per cent for Pakistan and 29 per cent for Vietnam.

“I just can’t stand participating in these insane booms, one way or the other. It seems to be working; everybody wants to pile in, and I have a different attitude. I want to make my money by selling people things that are good for them, not things that are bad for them,” Charlie Munger said at the event on Friday. “Believe me, the people who are creating cryptocurrencies are not thinking about the customer, they are thinking about themselves.”

Also read: Crypto Bill 2021: 5 key questions about crypto ads, scams, taxes, more answered by Nirmala Sitharaman

In May this year as well, during a Q&A session at Berkshire’s annual shareholder meeting, Munger said Bitcoin is like waving the red flag at the bull. “Of course, I hate the bitcoin success and I don’t welcome a currency that’s useful to kidnappers and extortionists, and so forth,” he said. “I think I should say modestly that I think the whole damn development is disgusting and contrary to the interests of civilization.”

“It’s really kind of an artificial substitute for gold. And since I never buy any gold, I never buy any bitcoin,” Bitcoin.com quoted Munger at the annual shareholders meeting of the publishing company Daily Journal in February.

With the growth in crypto adoption globally, the total market cap of all cryptocurrencies in the world had breached the $3 trillion mark in November 2021, nearly six after the m-cap stood at $2 trillion. The m-cap had first hit the $2 trillion mark on April 6 this year before it declined by thousands of dollars to around $1.2 trillion. It had again jumped back to $2 trillion in mid-August. Going through multiple corrections, the crypto world in September also slipped twice below the $2 trillion level.