“Bitcoin is better than currency” Bill Gates

After a long period during, which he remained silent on Bitcoin, Microsoft's legendary co-founder Bill Gates has spoken and given a thumbs up to the controversial crypto-currency Yahoo Finance reported.

At the Sibos 2014 financial-services industry conference in Boston, US' richest man came out in support of the currency, at least as a low-cost payments solution.  

At the event, when quizzed about Bitcoin's potential to ease the cost of payment transactions for moving money from one place to another, Gates had a lot of positive things to say about the virtual money.

''Bitcoin is exciting because it shows how cheap it can be,'' he told Erik Schatzker during a Bloomberg TV's Smart Street show interview yesterday.

''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.''

Gates again reiterated his position on crypto currencies during the event's closing keynote address, in which he stated that, in the future, financial transactions will eventually ''be digital, universal and almost free.''

While he seemed relatively bullish on how inexpensive transacting in Bitcoin could be, Gates did not praise its anonymity.

''The customers aren't trying to be anonymous, you know, they're willing to be known, so Bitcoin technology is key, so you could add to it or build a similar technology, where there's enough attribution that people feel comfortable that this is nothing to do with terrorism or any kind of money laundering.''

According to Coin Report, that gave an interesting view of the philanthropic perspective on Bitcoin, but while it was disappointing that Gates implicitly dismissed the value of privacy as a human right, that perspective was understandable in the context of Gates philanthropic work.

Through his Gates foundation, the legendary Microsoft co-founder deals with a number of extremely serious problems, such as the epidemics of HIV, malaria and tuberculosis.

It was therefore entirely understandable that for Gates the value of the currency lay more in its ability to cut the cost of international money transfers, which represented one of the primary ways that money flowed into poor countries, in the form of cash wired back home by workers living abroad in wealthier nations.