Gates 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 Sa

Gates 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.