Microsoft founder Bill Gates shared his brutally honest opinion about non-fungible tokens during a technology conference.
Tech Crunch’s Climate conference began Tuesday and continues through Thursday in Berkeley, California. Gates was asked Tuesday what he thought of NFT collections, which are unique digital items that are stored via the blockchain, particularly what he thought about the Bored Apes collection. This particular Ethereum collection exclusively contains portraits of cartoon chimpanzees in various costumes.
“Obviously, expensive, you know, digital images of monkeys are going to improve the world immensely,” Gates sarcastically replied, to a room of laughter.
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Bill Gates tells us what he really thinks of Bored Apes at #TCClimate: pic.twitter.com/vBc8BaaTup
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“I’m used to asset classes where, like a farm, where they have output or a company where they make products,” Gates said. “To have an asset class that’s 100% based on, sort of, greater fool theory, that somebody’s going to pay more for it than I do, and where it has, at its heart, sort of, this anonymity, that you avoid taxation or any sort of government rules … I’m not involved in that. I’m not long or short.”
Within 24 hours of Gates’s comments, the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT dropped to below $100,000 for the first time since August 2021. The collection, which has been around since May 2021, starting at about $86.62, now costs about $96,469.
Gates’s comments also came one day after Colorado Gov. Jared Polis announced he would be selling 2,200 NFTs in his latest fundraising efforts for just over $52 each. Three weeks earlier, Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) appeared at a Heritage Foundation conference dedicated to cryptocurrency and bitcoin and lauded the fact that this currency was incorruptible from federal involvement.
Four years ago, Gates hosted a Reddit thread, inviting users to ask him anything. When one user asked him about bitcoin, he responded that it was “super risky.”
“The main feature of crypto currencies is their anonymity. I don’t think this is a good thing,” Gates wrote. “The Governments ability to find money laundering and tax evasion and terrorist funding is a good thing.”
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Colorado, Russia, North Korea, and Venezuela have since adopted bitcoin as an accepted currency.
