Bill Gates recently came out with this: https://cointelegraph.com/news/bill-gates-id-short-crazier-speculative-bitcoin-if-i-could (essentially, that Bitcoin is useless as an asset class because it has no inherent value)
This is the Bill Gates who famously said to Bloomberg in 2014:
“Bitcoin is better than currency in that you don’t have to be physically in the same place and, of course, for large transactions, currency can get pretty inconvenient.”
So what, if anything, has changed?
Well, arguably not that much.
In 2014, Bill Gates was speaking about Bitcoin as a transactional currency, and more specifically about the fact that Bitcoins (in comparison to money) can be sent anywhere in the world very quickly, due to the peer-to-peer nature of the blockchain.
And he was right. Sending fiat from Bombay to the UK or LA involves numerous different banking institutions and at least twenty-four hours.
But Bitcoin as an asset class? That’s a very different thing indeed.
An asset is only an asset if it has value, and value is generally described as someone of worth to others: a car is an asset, a house is an asset. But a digital log of a digital currency contained only in a wallet address that nobody can touch or see or smell?
An entirely different proposition.
And this is the battle that cryptocurrencies face: not only must we convince the wider public that crypto exists, but that it has value. And this is because a currency – and especially a digital one – is not necessarily seen as an asset.
We need to get past the semantics of the quotes of famous people, and instead look at how we can convince the world that what we are engaged in has value and, crucially, a real-world application for the masses.
Let’s get to it.