Bill Gates just called NFTs and crypto a scam. The genius billionaire expressed his thoughts on the emerging era of digital currency as reported by CNN at the TechCrunch conference. He said it was “100% based on greater fool theory.” Referring to the BAYC NFTs, Bill Gates called them “expensive digital images of monkeys.”
Bill Gates, the founder, and CEO of Microsoft, the biggest tech company in the world that provides its users with products and services for home and business, has no plans to enter the crypto space anytime soon.
Like many people, Bill Gates also believes that the concept of NFTs and crypto is a great scam.
In discussing NFTs, Bill Gates mocked them by calling them JPEG images that were only valued because people believed them to be so. He called out the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs as “expensive digital images of monkeys.”
This is quite surprising for a tech company’s CEO to say because most tech companies are slowly expanding themselves into the Web3 space and introducing their own native tokens.
With Bill Gates’s statement, everyone is convinced that Microsoft might not be breaking into the blockchain world anytime soon.
Bill Gates prefers traditional investing
For Bill Gates, the well-established traditional market seems to be the best choice for investment and he advises small investors to not try out the new market that might result in a huge loss for them.
“I’m used to asset classes, like a farm where they have output, or like a company where they make products,” He said referring to NFTs.
On crypto, Bill Gates told the audience he hasn’t invested in any of the digital currencies and has no plans to be involved, “I’m not long or short any of those things.”
This might be relatable to many people since traditional industries give investors the physical products but for Web3, everything is digital and based on whether people bid on it or not.
Bill Gates has been vocal about the dangers for regular investors to put their money on Bitcoin for many years. He believes that digital currency is not volatile enough to make it the main source of income for investors.
Last year, he talked about crypto by saying, “I do think people get bought into these manias who may not have as much money to spare. My general thought would be that if you have less money than Elon, you should probably watch out.”
Although Web3 is expanding into the mainstream as many Venture Capitalists turn toward the new era of digital, many people still refuse or find it hard to adopt this concept of digital like Bill Gates who seems to be firm on his statement.
Final words
Many people might agree with Bill Gates’ statement about traditional investing after seeing the great crypto crash for the past few months; it is a cold crypto winter with no sun to be seen.
Today, the Bitcoin price is trading at $20k, ETH at $1088, which makes it even worse due to the 8.6% CPI increase.
Seeing the declining prices with no improvement, many people wonder if Bill Gates is right in calling crypto and NFTs a sham. After all, he had already predicted this to happen last year.
Will the crypto market prove Gates wrong? Only the future can answer this question.
