Thursday, January 29, 2015

Bill Gates Takes On Bitcoin



Bill Gates says there are two reasons Bitcoin won't help the poor, reports CoinBuzz:
His first reason was that the value of bitcoin is too volatile compared to most people’s local currencies. The large downswings in the cryptocurrency’s value make it likely a person to lose money. For example, the bitcoin price has fallen by -9.37% in the last 24 hours, and -56.82% in the last 6 months. This volatility prevents it from being used as a store of value.
The second reason Gates cited was that transactions made with bitcoin cannot be reversed. Payments that are made with bitcoin can only be returned by the person or company they were sent to. Small mistakes could end up being very costly, especially for those living in poverty. Gates also added that “anonymity doesn’t work”, because there is no personal information linked to a bitcoin address that can be used to contact its owner.
So what is the man sitting on top of the biggest pile of cash in the world going to do about it? Why he is using mobile payment systems, instead of Bitcoin, when he tosses out some of his cash:

Gates said, “Overall financial transactions will get cheaper using the work [the Gates Foundation does] and Bitcoin related approaches.”



He said that the Gates Foundation is “far closer” to bringing mobile banking than bitcoin to developing countries.



The Gates Foundation mobile banking to be effective because it costs nearly nothing to process digital transactions. Also, a large percentage of adults in developing countries already have access to a mobile phone.



M-Pesa, an SMS money transfer service launched in Kenya in 2007, has been so successful that there are more accounts than the number of adults in the country. Bangladeshi mobile money provider bKash currently processes over 60 million transactions worth a total of over $1 billion monthly.



The Gates Foundation predicts that in 15 years, 2 billion people will have access to a bank account for the first time using their phones.
   -RW 

4 comments:

  1. who runs barter town...?

    Bill Gates Calls for ‘Global Government’

    Speaking with Germany’s “Süddeutsche Zeitung” newspaper Tuesday, Gates decried the fact that a proper United Nations system has failed to materialize as planned.

    “You can make fun of it, but in truth it was sad how the conference in Copenhagen is run, how individual who behave like the UN system failed,” Gates said according to an English translation in the Huffington Post.

    Gates went on to stress his position further, stating that a global government was “badly needed” in order to combat an array of issues ailing the planet.


    http://www.dailyrapid.com/2015/01/bill-gates-calls-global-government/?

    bill's got the master plan

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  2. And the third reason is: "And I, Bill Gates, will end up OWNING THEM ALL!" Bwahaahaahaaahaaaaaaaa!

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  3. I wonder how many Bitcoins he owns.

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  4. One should also consider Monetas out of Zug, Switzerland as a competitor to what Gates appears to be offering. Casey Research had an article out last week, I believe, where they covered some of the cryptocurrency and cryptocurrency-related offshoots. It included Ripple and Ethereum which were mentioned on EPJ recently.

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