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Young Bill Gates would have been an NFT degen

September 22, 2021

I’ve been reading “Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire” by James Wallace and Jim Erickson. Overlapping with my time reading this, I started learning about the curious world of NFTs. Which leads to this list of tenuous connections between Bill Gates and NFTs.

Bill Gates would be comfortable using the world computer

Bill Gates used a teletype machine in his early days learning to program. You needed to purchase computer time for the teletype systems.

Today? Popular NFTs have their related contracts on the Ethereum blockchain. An ELI5 explanation describes it as a worldwide computer. And, similar to purchasing computer time, you do transactions that cost different amounts of gas.

The Lakeside Mothers Club would likely be raising money that had a chance of being blown trying to mint NFTs without understanding gas fees.

(Bill definitely would’ve understood how to get the MetaMask settings right, though.)

Bill Gates was using the computer so much that his parents grounded him

Young men addicted to The Machine had no sense of limits, he said. They had tunnel vision, unable to see the real world.

He was… pretty much fine with it. He had plenty of other curiosities to follow.

In NFT-land, you’ll see plenty of people with interests outside of crypto. Because NFTs can involve skills from different fields, those outside interests can be valuable in building up a broader perspective.

And who doesn’t enjoy a Lindy walk?

He knew how to flip things

There are the stories out there of people trading up from some random 0.01 ETH pfp all the way to a Cryptopunk. That takes some hustle and timing.

Gates had an eye for this, like in the above story where he’s able to see the novelty value for memorabilia of a dropped candidate.

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Bill GatesHard DriveJames WallaceJim Erickson
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