Bill Gates is not bullish on cryptocurrency
In an interview with Bloomberg TV, Bill Gates expressed his skepticism about the prospects of cryptocurrency.
When asked about Elon Musk’s full-throated enthusiasm for bitcoin,
Well look. Elon has tons of money and he’s very sophisticated. So you know I don’t worry that his bitcoin will sort of randomly go up or down. I do think people get bought into these manias who may not have as much money to spare. So I’m not bullish on Bitcoin. My general thought would be that you know if you have less money than Elon you should probably watch out…
He goes on to list what he doesn’t like about bitcoin
Look there are things we invest in in society that produce output. Bitcoin happens to use a lot of energy. It happens to promote anonymous transactions. They’re not reversible transactions.
Gates is right about the first part. Elon Musk is wealthy not because he made wise, early investments in bitcoin (which he may well have), but because of his ownership of very valuable companies, most notably Tesla. However large Musk’s bitcoin holdings may be, their rise and fall don’t make a difference to his quality of life. That isn’t true for most of the rest of us – Gates is warning us to not bet all our investments on bitcoin in the hope of striking it rich.
About the second part, well. One argument people make is that many of us hold US dollars to mitigate the impact of the devaluation of our country’s currency – say the Indian rupee – against the US dollar. They argue that Bitcoin is no different. Against the rupee, its value happens to have risen a lot more than the dollar.