Microsoft co-founder gives Bitcoin credit for dramatic changes in global finances but believes it will not be the dominant system in the future
Bill Gates articulated his views on digital currency in a series of interviews that accompanied the release of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s annual letter to the public. A substantial part of this year’s letter focuses on the problem of people in Africa who have no access to banks. Gates believes that mobile banking will help those people transform their lives.
“Poor people don’t have bank accounts and so when they have an emergency [or] they want to borrow or save, it’s very tough. [With] small transactions, the fees are just too high when you have banks and ATMs and all that. If we take the cellphone and just use digital currency, then you can have all those financial services”, he told Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show.
Later, Gates reiterated his position in an interview to Backchanell. The philanthropist suggested that existing digital currencies as well as mobile platforms like bKash and M-Pesa (supported by the Gates Foundation in the past) will not address the problem in full.
“There’s a lot that Bitcoin or Ripple and variants can do to make moving money between countries easier and getting fees down pretty dramatically. But Bitcoin won’t be the dominant system. When you talk about a domestic economy, [you must have] the idea of attributed transactions, where if you sent it to the wrong person you can actually get the transaction reversed. [And a traditional system] doesn’t have this huge fluctuation where the value of your account is going up and down by a factor of two. We need things that draw on the revolution of Bitcoin, but Bitcoin alone is not good enough”.
In October 2014, Gates called Bitcoin “exciting” in an interview on Bloomberg TV and praised its ability to provide a relatively low-cost transaction network. However, he expressed some doubts regarding the possibility of mainstream adoption of bitcoin due to its anonymity and associations with terrorism and money laundering. In December 2014, Microsoft added bitcoin as a payment option for purchasing Xbox games and mobile content.
