Sure. Many (but not all) cryptocurrencies and NFTs are scams. DYOR.
But before listening to Bill Gates about anything tech, here are some of my foggy remembrances of him and M$:
- didn't invent DOS - he and Paul Allen bought it, rebranded and licensed it out to IBM
- thought 640k should be enough for anyone, impeded higher memory models for years
- built a single-user, single-task operating system, and shoe-horned in the multiuser and multitasking much later
- wanted Novell Netware, then added the TCP/IP internet stack as an afterthought. Trumpet, anyone?
- took the whole idea of a desktop, mouse and keyboard setup from Xerox (as did Apple), then never improved on it
- built an O/S that wasn't reliable until 2003/XP'ish
- failed to tackle the rampant viruses, worms, spyware and bloatware made possible by a weak security model
- provided the high-performance APIs only to business collaborators
- bought Visio then wrecked it
- implemented Java, tried to own it, changed naming conventions and rebranded the result C#
- sponsored Darl McBride's attacks on SCO Linux
- broke backwards-compatibility for VB with VB.NET and screwed many customers
- used Internet Exploder to add proprietary, licensed extensions to HTML to break competing browsers and webservers, to own the web
- employed monopolistic business practices and was called to senate hearings. "Depends on what your definition of 'is' is ..."
- tried the mobile computing thing too late
- never figured out tablet computing (iPad sucks now too though)
- bought the dump of private message data from Facebook (as did Netflix)
- collaborated with China to implement a government-censorable blockchain with a high fee-to-play model (NEO)
So now Bill Gates has comments about blockchain and NFTs. Okay then...
- Bill Gates still hasn't figured out blockchain's true use cases.
- Bill Gates isn't a savvy investor nor expert in monetary theory - he's just a monopolist who happened to be in the right place at the right time.
- Bill Gates doesn't understand crypto's case for individual financial freedom - his world only respects freedom for the wealthy.
- Bill Gates doesn't understand crypto's potential to deter war and slavery in the world, as he benefits from both.
- Bill Gates can't see beyond the stupid ape-pictures - he hasn't yet realized that NFTs are society's first encounter with the idea of tokenizing assets.
- Bill Gates will just watch as society figures out how to use NFTs and cryptos, then try to own all that too.
So Bill Gates can't say much about blockchain tech that would be of any real interest to me.