Bill Gates believes that the cryptocurrencies and the NFT –digital images whose ownership can be registered even if there are thousands of copies– they are a farce. During a TechCrunch conference, the Microsoft co-founder assured that both trends are “100% based on the older fool theory“, the notion that investors can make a lot of money on worthless assets as long as there is a third party willing to pay for it.
Although it was a talk about climate change, the American businessman and philanthropist ironically talked about virtual currencies and non-fungible tokens, two phenomena that have become especially popular in the last two years. Thus, he mocked the Bored Ape Yacht Club – a collection of NFTs owned by celebrities such as Justin Bieber or Paris Hilton and that have sold for millions of dollars per unit –, joking that “expensive digital images of monkeys will improve the world immensely“.
Gates’s criticisms come at a particularly delicate moment of crisis for the crypto environment. Bitcoin and Ethereum, the two best-known virtual currencies, have been collapsing for weeks, dragged down by the failure of other tokens such as Terra or Luna or by the collapse of crypto trading platforms such as Celsius Network. Since reaching its highest historical value in November with $69,000 a unit, Bitcoin has plummeted to the current 19,800. The collapse of this market has led other trading platforms such as Coinbase to announce that it will lay off 18% of its employees.
For Gates, the idea behind cryptocurrencies or NFTs is that they are worthless assets. “I’m used to asset classes like a farm where you produce, or like a company where you make products,” she said.