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Bitcoin not for me, says Bill Gates
- gowld 6y ago"Bill Gates" was removed from the title.
- nickmonad 6y ago> The billionaire said he did not choose his investments on the basis of whether they would be worth more to others. Entertain the notion, just for one second (even if you don't think it will happen), that people are envisioning a future where the bitcoin is just, you know... used? In that context, it's worth more to _them_, not "others". Also, didn't these people take a risk to earn their level of wealth? Starting a company can absolutely destroy people and their families, yet we encourage people to take these kinds of calculated risks everyday.
- tomdell 6y agoStarting a company has the potential to create something of value for people outside the company, though. Buying some Bitcoin and it increasing in value doesn’t really change anything in the world but the amount of money the person who bought it has. It’s not like Bitcoin use is very widespread or likely ever will be due to its slowness, power inefficiency, and government distaste. Bitcoin goes up in value mostly because more people think they’ll earn money from buying it and it subsequently increasing in value, not because it has become more useful.
- rchaud 6y agoSo if BTC's value goes up 50%, then down 20% in a matter of days, what is the delta in the number of people that are envisioning this future?
- killingtime74 6y agoExplain if I’m wrong but last I checked the transaction fee to transfer from 1 Bitcoin wallet to another is like $30 Australian dollars? My bank charges less for an international wire transfer much less non bank. https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees.html https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees... Can we stop pretending it’s a future payment system?
- rvz 6y ago> Can we stop pretending it’s a future payment system? Exactly. There are other alt-coins that are better suited to this purpose, unlike Bitcoin is a complete failure in regards to this.
- rvz 6y agoDownvoters: So is it better to send lots of Bitcoin including the high network fees all over the network then and also waste that money? There is a reason I said 'in regards to this' While I am bullish on bitcoin and some cryptocurrencies in general, I've known that several HN folks here have been very bearish on cryptocurrencies since they always refer it to another ponzi scheme or a general scam. I guess on HN, one bad ICO spoils the bunch. But at least give a response to this claim or a reason as to why this is 'wrong', rather than simply downvoting without a counter argument.
- rantwasp 6y ago1) it’s not 30$ for all transactions 2) how much time does your international wire transfer take to clear? can you do this transaction anywhere in the world where you have an internet connection?
- Rebelgecko 6y agoFor your last question, not only is the answer "Yes", I think the wire transfer wins on flexibility because there's several fallback options for when you don't have an internet connection.
- dehrmann 6y ago> "My general thought would be that if you have less money than Elon, you should probably watch out," he told Bloomberg. Isn't Elon the richest...I see what he did, there.
- ackbar03 6y agoOh gates you troll, thanks for the reminder
- rfd4sgmk8u 6y agoOf course Bill hates it, he never got it, he never really got the internet. His vision was a home PC on every desk. "Peer to Peer? Free Software? How will we ever charge licensing on that?"
- Hydraulix989 6y agoBill wrote the book "The Road Ahead" in the 90s. It heavily references an Information Superhighway and widespread PDA use (aka the modern Internet and smartphones). The book even predicts a future digital wallet based payment system.
- jdsully 6y agoThe book was written without mentioning the internet at all. He famously had to go back and add in the internet parts after it was already a sure thing. '95 was still early, but back then techies weren't ready to give BillG the benefit the doubt about anything. > After the book was written, but before it hit bookstores, Gates recognized that the Internet was gaining critical mass, and on December 7, 1995 — just weeks after the release of the book — he redirected Microsoft to become an Internet-focused company; in retrospect he had "vastly underestimated how important and how quickly the internet would come to prominence".[3] Then he and coauthor Rinearson spent several months revising the book, making it 20,000 words longer and focused on the Internet.[citation needed] The revised edition was published in October 1996 as a trade paperback,[6] with the subtitle "Completely revised and up-to-date.".[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_(Gates_book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_(Gates_book)
- Hydraulix989 6y agoCorrect, it mentioned the Information Superhighway instead; that was the revision. I have and read the first (hardback) edition, and still feel it is sufficiently foretelling. I encourage you to verify this for yourself because the [citation needed] here is telling!
- duxup 6y ago
- aaron695 6y agoThis article is junk. Is it a just a jumping point for peoples random thoughts on Bitcoin or Gates? Do we need an article every-time Gates says the world Bitcoin? The Bloomberg video is a little bit more interesting. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2021-02-23/bill-gates-i-m-not-bullish-on-bitcoin-video https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2021-02-23/bill-gates-... He makes the good point on the need to solve the remittance problem and we need to do something while we wait. Otherwise he's not committal. If money means a lot to you, don't bet it. Blah, blah. Smart non committal words. The Clubhouse interview is here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQFNb93q3CI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQFNb93q3CI
- rodarmor 6y ago"Elon has tonnes of money and he's very sophisticated, so I don't worry that his Bitcoin will sort of randomly go up or down." I feel like if an American is being quoted, American spelling should be used. It's weird to imagine Bill Gates saying "tonnes".
- Marsymars 6y agoI was curious so I did a bit of a search - it doesn’t seem like this particular situation is really handled by style guides, but it seems that the convention from both American and British publications is to use the standard spelling of the publisher for quotes of speech.
- guerrilla 6y agoYeah, I mean you wouldn't use either version of English in a Spanish paper. You quote people in your native language.
- rchaud 6y agoThey're quoting what he said, not what he wrote. It's a British news site, so using British spelling seems fine.
- Geee 6y agoHe is trying to push his own digital currencies in developing countries that compete with Bitcoin. So obviously, he tries to defend his position.
- vessenes 6y agoGates is the victim of some aggressive messaging from the Ripple crew in 2017 or so. His early comments on Bitcoin were very positive; in fact, he called the Satoshi a paper a “technical tour-de-force” a few years prior. However, Ripple’s go-to-market strategy in that era was to attack Bitcoin as a darknet currency. Their board and partners at that time were stacked with ‘traditional banking’ types and others as part of an attempt to be the ‘safer Bitcoin’, and they pitched the mutability and reversability of their chain as a key feature that had a social good. There were a few key meetings with Ripple folks brokered at the Gates foundation, and after those his message has stayed pretty much on point: the four horsemen are bad, and therefore Bitcoin is bad, we should use other systems. In this, I think he’s wrong - tech that comes under the same regulatory regime as existing payment and monetary systems doesn’t add much to the world.
- xiphias2 6y agoHave fun staying poor
- nwah1 6y agoWere you being ironic?
- BenoitP 6y ago> that he would "short" it if he could This takes on a new meaning in light of GameStop's massive naked short selling, with buyers never really possessing hard shares [1]. I'm not saying a short selling infrastructure can't be built to target Bitcoin. I'm saying that, unlike trading shares, you can physically own Bitcoin. You're not at the mercy of your broker only selling you an IOU instead of a share. Point number 2: to actually build a Bitcoin short selling infrastructure, you're going to need first to acquire some amount of Bitcoin liquidity. You can't go fully naked. And this will drive Bitcoin price's further up. [1] https://prospect.org/power/gamestop-mess-exposes-the-naked-short-selling-scam/ https://prospect.org/power/gamestop-mess-exposes-the-naked-s...
- TheCoelacanth 6y agoI don't think that's an inherent attribute of bitcoin, it's based entirely on what types of deals brokers and traders are willing to engage in. If you buy a stock and actually take possession of it instead of letting your broker hold onto it for you, then your shares can't be lent out. People generally don't do that because it makes it harder to buy and sell and there is usually not a realistic chance of your share being lent out actually hurting you. If you buy bitcoin and let a broker hold onto it for you, then they could lend it out. Off-chain transactions like this are becoming increasingly popular as people look to avoid increasing transaction fees.
- mensetmanusman 6y agoBitcoin has no inherent value, it is a string of characters. At least with gold, you can hire artists to create amazing interior design works of art. The outer electrons in the gold atom are moving at relativistic speeds, and you have to account for this to predict its chemical qualities; namely, its unique ability to resist oxidation at room temperature (copper turns green). BTC Will work as a store of value so long as there are a stream of other people who also believe it is a store of value. If everyone tries to exit on the same week or month the value goes to zero. Large banking institutes who purchased billions of dollars in bitcoin will be incentivized to simply hold, or else they would have to admit to their shareholders they paid billions of dollars for a string of characters. One event that would be a ‘black swan’ for bitcoin would be a North Korean hack on coinbase. If you disrupt trust in a mainstream bitcoin bank, people would flee.
- intev 6y ago> Bitcoin has no inherent value, it is a string of characters. So is any digital "good". If you value things that way, nothing on the computer is valuable. > At least with gold, you can hire artists to create amazing interior design works of art. Gold's primary value is from it's rarity. Very few cultures value gold for it's artistic attributes, India being the primary one. How often do you see someone wear gold jewelry in western countries? > BTC Will work as a store of value so long as there are a stream of other people who also believe it is a store of value. True for anything that is considered rare. The moment people deem it's not good enough or rare enough, it becomes useless. Paintings by famous artists are expensive purely because a certain group of people place high value on them. Otherwise it's just old paint on a canvas. > If everyone tries to exit on the same week or month the value goes to zero. If everyone goes to a bank at the same time and try to withdraw, there's no way any bank has the liquidity to be able to process this. Historically countries have placed withdrawal limits to curb this during mania. > Large banking institutes who purchased billions of dollars in bitcoin will be incentivized to simply hold, or else they would have to admit to their shareholders they paid billions of dollars for a string of characters. They are incentivized because the value keeps doing up due to it's fixed supply. If I gave you a rock, and I told you every year it's going to go up in value, wouldn't you be incentivized to hold it? > One event that would be a ‘black swan’ for bitcoin would be a North Korean hack on coinbase. If you disrupt trust in a mainstream bitcoin bank, people would flee. Yea, that would be disastrous. Unfortunately there's no way to recover stolen bitcoins, and due to it's inherently virtual nature, it makes it extremely susceptible to hacking. From everything you've mentioned this is the only real criticism, and I'm not sure we should let a fear of a black swan event drive us away from a potentially revolutionary financial system.
- jokoon 6y agoThe meaningful difference with real money is that if your real money get stolen, you can be reimbursed. With bitcoin there is nothing you can do. I prefer when the supply of money is under control. If bitcoin exchangers can agree to a fixed rate between dollar and btc, maybe people will care.
- conanbatt 6y agoIf you can be reimbursed, you can also be denied your funds. This happens in plenty of scenarios (a fun institutional example was Citibank recently). There are different use cases where sometimes you would like being able to revert transactions and sometimes you don't want it to happen. The supply of money is most under control with BTC, to be clear. The price is now very volatile, but volatile up is way better than stable down to me.
- majortennis 6y agohow do you get your money back when you get mugged or scammed?
- rchaud 6y agoBy deactivating your credit card. I lost my card once, took all of 60 seconds to dial an automated line, confirm my ID and cancel the card.
- bhandziuk 6y agoYou are usually not carrying your life savings in cash so getting mugged sucks but it's week altering not life altering. Getting scammed can happen with bitcoin just as easily except, depending on the scam, you have a chance of getting your dollars back.
- loceng 6y agoLikewise, policy like the Magnitsky Act can't be implemented - and so known bad actors can't then be punished financially to help sway them away from continuing their bad behaviour. This unavoidable pitfall never gets answered when I bring it up in conversation with a Bitcoin owner.