Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, declared Bitcoin better than both gold and US dollar, and shared his admiration for the mathematics underlying the digital coin.
Speaking to a tech reporter on October 22, 2017, at Money20/20 in Las Vegas, the computer genius said Bitcoin’s fixed total supply means the digital coin will not be diluted as it happens with US dollar because the government can always print more money.
Wozniak called the US dollar “kind of phony” for that matter, while he described Bitcoin as more “genuine and real.”
He also compared Bitcoin owners to house owners. “Your house has value. And if it is a house today, 40 years from now, it still is a house in value,” he noted, even if prices and government taxes go up.
Wozniak shared his appreciation for the Mathematics which underlie Bitcoin and the blockchain in general. He said that he “admired” Bitcoin even when the cryptocurrency was first announced.
“I looked at it as a form of currency,” he said, although initially he did not understand the technology. Wozniak also said that he had trouble buying bitcoins in the first place, because of the requirement to set up a special bank account. That process kept him from “getting early bitcoin.”
Wozniak Sees Opportunities for Blockchain
Steve Wozniak also talked about blockchain, the technology which underlies the Bitcoin concept. Wozniak seemed confident that the vast number of different blockchain applications that are announced almost every day is a healthy sign, but it will take some time for people to get used to.
The inventor of the original Apple computer thinks Blockchain will play an essential part in allowing people to track things transparently. He even gave an example, about monitoring minerals.
“Right now, there is conflict with minerals in the world, and you don’t want to buy conflict minerals. Well, how do you avoid it?” Wozniak explained that gold companies usually buy the mineral from different countries and then smelt it together. Thus the consumer cannot know where the gold came from. Wozniak said that blockchain offers a solution for proper tracking of gold:
“They are applying [blockchain] technology where all the payment can only go to the good, legitimate sources that don’t have conflict minerals,” he noted.
Wozniak also talked about Ethereum and the advent of smart contract platforms as opportunities. He made parallels with the first days of computers and computer programming when individuals created “tens of thousands of programs” most of them nobody had even thought of.