Bill Gates: Bitcoin Good but Won't Be Dominant System, Mentions Ripple

In this year's Gates Foundation annual letter, Bill and Melinda lay out their 15-year roadmap for the challenges they want to solve.

The Foundation's work is estimated to have saved at least five million lives and improved the quality of many more. One of Gates' objectives has been to make it easy to move money for the over two billion of the world's unbanked population. Two of his projects include bKash in Bangladesh and M-Pesa in Kenya, which make it possible to send and store money with just a mobile phone.

As to how well digital currencies can help in this regard, Gates acknowledged to Medium that:

"There’s a lot that Bitcoin Bitcoin While some may still be wondering what is Bitcoin, who created Bitcoin, or how does Bitcoin work, one thing is certain: Bitcoin has changed the world.No one can remain indifferent to this revolutionary, decentralized, digital asset nor to its blockchain technology.In fact, we’ve gone a long way ever since a Florida resident Laszlo Hanyecz made BTC’s first official commercial transaction with a real company by trading 10,000 Bitcoins for 2 pizzas at his local Papa John’s.One could now argue that While some may still be wondering what is Bitcoin, who created Bitcoin, or how does Bitcoin work, one thing is certain: Bitcoin has changed the world.No one can remain indifferent to this revolutionary, decentralized, digital asset nor to its blockchain technology.In fact, we’ve gone a long way ever since a Florida resident Laszlo Hanyecz made BTC’s first official commercial transaction with a real company by trading 10,000 Bitcoins for 2 pizzas at his local Papa John’s.One could now argue that Read this Term or Ripple Ripple Ripple was co-founded by Jed McCaleb and Chris Larsen and was debuted in 2012 as both a digital disbursement network and a pre-mined digital coin denoted as XRP. Possessing less market cap than both Bitcoin and Ethereum, Ripple ranks as the third-largest cryptocurrency.Its dual open-source and peer-to-peer (P2P) decentralized platform whose network is capable of working with any form of money such as GBP, Ethereum, Yen, etc. What is Ripple Used For? Known as a gateway, participants of Ripple may Ripple was co-founded by Jed McCaleb and Chris Larsen and was debuted in 2012 as both a digital disbursement network and a pre-mined digital coin denoted as XRP. Possessing less market cap than both Bitcoin and Ethereum, Ripple ranks as the third-largest cryptocurrency.Its dual open-source and peer-to-peer (P2P) decentralized platform whose network is capable of working with any form of money such as GBP, Ethereum, Yen, etc. What is Ripple Used For? Known as a gateway, participants of Ripple may Read this Term and variants can do to make moving money between countries easier and getting fees down pretty dramatically."

However, he continued, Bitcoin won't be the dominant system. For a domestic economy, Bitcoin has two major shortcomings. First, in the event funds are sent to the wrong person, transactions can't be reversed. And second, "[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."

The software giant he founded, Microsoft, began accepting Bitcoin late last year. But like most companies taking it for payment, bitcoins are immediately converted into fiat, thereby not exposing the company to wild price fluctuations.