Throughout history, when new emerging technologies or industries come to market, the “common people” often turn to the successful entrepreneurs and previous generation of innovators to see what they think, and to gauge their reactions.
Cryptocurrency is no exception, and some of the world’s richest men have provided their thoughts on cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, and blockchain technology.
Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, is currently the world’s richest man, valued at over $100 billion dollars. His company not only survived the dotcom crash, but thrived in the space after it, growing from a small online bookseller to potentially the world’s most popular retailer.
Despite his career and wealth being founded on technology, however, Jeff Bezos has rarely commented on cryptocurrency. Amazon itself has purchased domain names associated with cryptocurrency in late 2017, and Amazon Web Services partnered with R3 in 2017 to help create one of the first distributed ledgers on the platform, Corda.
But we haven’t heard anything from the main man himself yet on the subject.
Bill Gates, however, has made his views known and they’ve been on both sides of the spectrum. Earlier in the life of cryptocurrency, Gates was a fan of Bitcoin and believed it had a lot to offer people between cheap transactions, digital usage, and people feeling comfortable about being able to spend.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has also supported lots of blockchain oriented projects, including hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to Kenyan Bitcoin payment platforms, and pushes for virtual currency development throughout Africa.
More recently, however, Gates has seemed to change his mind to a degree, and now speaks out about the ills of the anonymous use of cryptocurrency, and how it’s a risky endeavour for those to invest in, offering nothing of real value.
The most famous investment and finance name in the world, Warren Buffet, has long been a skeptic of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. He’s believed since 2014 that Bitcoin’s value is merely as a transactional tool, and that it can and will be replaced by something else, similar to how checks have largely been replaced by other means of transfer.
However, Buffet and his partners have long been known to have missed the ball when it comes to many tech opportunities. After passing initial investments on Apple, Google, and Amazon to name a few, is Bitcoin and cryptocurrency just the latest miss for Buffet?
