Here’s What Bitcoin Enthusiast Bill Gates Just Discussed with Donald Trump
Bill Gates and president-elect Donald J. Trump had a telephone during which the Microsoft founder discussed his climate change views. The call didn’t leave the environmentalist billionaire totally depressed about the prospect of the next four years.
Mr. Gates presented part of his climate change agenda for Mr. Trump in a phone call that the tech pioneer called “not unproductive.”
The billionaire tech investor, and Bitcoin technology enthusiast, is a staunch proponent of combatting climate change with innovation.
“The key point I was pushing there was the opportunity for innovation in not only energy but also medicine and education,” Gates told Bloomberg, “and encouraging the idea that that’s a great deal and a great thing for American leadership.”ange and recently launched a billion-dollar initiative to lessen greenhouse gas emissions.
Gates admitted under Mr. Trump there would be fewer incentives for renewable energy, but he foresees increased investment and research into the problem.
Mr. Gates told Bloomberg that “the most bipartisan piece of energy policy has been a commitment to energy R&D [research and development].”
“Innovations could be bipartisan. We should all do our best,” Gates told Bloomberg.
Mr. Gates has sung Bitcoin’s praises. Long considered one of the world’s richest men, his eyes light up when he discusses possibilities for the future of Bitcoin technology.
“I think it’s a technical tour de force but that it is an area where governments are going to maintain a dominant role.”
“Bitcoin is exciting because it shows how cheap it can be. Bitcoin is better than currency in that you don’t have to be physically in the same place and, of course, for large transactions, currency can get pretty inconvenient.”
To be sure, Mr. Gates has tempered his praises of Bitcoin by saying that Bitcoin technology alone won’t be enough to fix the problem.
“There’s a lot that Bitcoin or variants can do to make moving money between countries easier and getting fees down pretty dramatically. But Bitcoin won’t be the dominant system. When you talk about a domestic economy, [you must have] the idea of attributed transactions, where if you sent it to the wrong person you could actually get the transaction reversed. [And a traditional system] doesn’t have this huge fluctuation where the value of your account is going up and down by a factor of two. We need things that draw on the revolution of Bitcoin, but Bitcoin alone is not good enough.”
The Gates Foundation gave a grant to blockchain company, Bitsoko, of $100,000.
While some have postulated bitcoin could help to solve climate change, others have noted that the network’s consensus mechanism, the miners, could consume as much electricity as Denmark come 2020.
Image from Shutterstock.
