Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has said Bitcoin should be at the “heart of our business dealings.” However, he went on to say:
“The government will never let it get out of their control. If it got to the point where everything was done with crypto and it didn’t pass through governments for observation and taxation and all that. Nah, governments would just disallow it.”
Wozniak berates the ability of the Federal Reserve to create new dollars, comparing it to the fixed supply of Bitcoin’s 21 million. He claims that “the government makes all of its taxes off of inflation”
Fiat is an “artificial system. It is not like science or math or logic or computer programing.” Given that earlier in the interview, he claimed that Bitcoin was “pure mathematics,” it is clear why he is so passionate about crypto. He has long held this stance, and he does not show signs of abating the belief.
Woz says Bitcoin is “natural”
In 2018, Woz stated:
“Bitcoin is mathematically defined… and its pure and there’s no human running, there’s no company running and it’s just…growing and growing…and surviving, that to me says something that is natural and nature is more important than all of our human conventions.”
He echoed these earlier statements this week because of “nature over humans, always.” To Wozniak, it seems Bitcoin is something that has evolved naturally. It is pushed forward by a collective of people from all over the world with no CEO, no managers, no board of directors. It has no founder and no centralised leadership. Bitcoin will go wherever the technology takes it.
Bitcoin is what Apple was not
As someone who famously left Apple due to his disagreements with the direction leadership was taking the company, it is unsurprising that he has fallen in love with Bitcoin.
To Wozniak, I believe that Bitcoin is everything that Apple was not. It is a modern technological marvel based on logic and mathematics, two things Wozniak understands very well. There are no sales targets with Bitcoin or even project deadlines, something that plagued him at Apple.
Conflict over the price of the Lisa and project deadlines ultimately led to Wozniak leaving Apple. A conflict in crypto results from an unsuccessful upgrade. If validators don’t accept an upgrade on the Bitcoin blockchain, it creates a fork, and everyone continues with their code.
Companies, however, don’t have this option and have to restart the debate until there is either consensus or someone leaves. The removal of the human aspect of the business is something that Wozniak admires.
Wozniak has a horse in the race.
Wozniak is also involved in a pre-sale token, Unicoin. It will be interesting to see how he tackles the above concerns as Unicoin gains pace ahead of its proposed launch in 2023. The asset-backed token announced in February has not yet been tokenised, with the project proclaiming to be a better investment than Bitcoin.
The token will hopefully not be akin to other crypto projects that Wozniak has labelled as “just collecting a bunch of money from people who want to invest at the very earliest stage.” Their website asks the question. “Is it realistic to compete with Bitcoin?” To which they quote:
“Technological trailblazers often fail to stay out in front. We don’t Excite or Infoseek or WebCrawler; we google. Those search engines were born before Google, but only the latecomer became so universal it turned into a verb. … Although bitcoin has been around for 13 years, the crypto market is nowhere near mature. There may never have been another type of asset where winners and losers change so fast ..”
Wozniak is undoubtedly a fan of crypto, and he is undoubtedly a genius when it comes to the world of technology. However, only time will tell if Bitcoin will be the “Infoseek” of the blockchain space.
It is a question I have asked before. I can believe in a world where my children have never heard of Bitcoin, but crypto is a part of daily life. So, could Wozniak be behind yet another technology that will change the world?