Bitcoin Daily: Bill Gates Would Bet Against Bitcoin, China Might Have Iceland’s Missing Bitcoin Miners

Bill Gates would bet against bitcoin if there was a simple way to do so, CNBC reported. “As an asset class, you’re not producing anything and so you shouldn’t expect it to go up,” Gates said. “It’s kind of a pure ‘greater fool theory’ type of investment … I agree I would short it if there was an easy way to do it.”

While bitcoin did reach above the $19,000 level in December, the cryptocurrency has since fallen considerably. The price of bitcoin was $9,373.83 as of 8:51 p.m. on Monday (May 7).

And 600 bitcoin mining computers that were reported lifted from Iceland in a massive heist may be in China, CoinDesk reported. China has reportedly seized 600 machines in the Tianjin area after they detected higher-than-normal electricity use, Xinhua had reported. The people behind the mining had allegedly short-circuited a meter to avoid having to pay for electricity. The meter would have registered “hundreds of thousands of yuan” in electricity costs, according to Xinhua.

Still, it’s not entirely clear if those machines are, in fact, the exact same ones that were taken in the heist. There is currently a $60,000 reward for information on the missing computers.

In other news, Oracle is preparing to roll out blockchain software, Bloomberg reported. The company plans to unveil a platform-as-a-service blockchain product along with decentralized ledger-based applications.

One client of Oracle is the Banco de Chile, which is seeking to use a hyperledger to keep track of inter-bank transactions. Another client is the government of Nigeria, which is seeking to keep track of import duties and customs.

And you soon may be able to get a CryptoKitty of a celebrity, CoinDesk reported. The first subject will be Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors.

“We are launching a series of … three exclusive Steph Curry CryptoKitties [which] will be representative of his personalities,” CryptoKitty head of partnerships, Caty Tedman, told CoinDesk. “The first will be sold by him, and it’ll be up to him whether he wants to sell the other two.”