Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak hopes bitcoin will become a single global currency
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey recently said he believes bitcoin will become the single global currency, something that Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak hopes will happen.
“I buy into what Jack Dorsey says, not that I necessarily believe it’s going to happen, but because I want it to be that way, that is so pure thinking,” Wozniak told CNBC on Monday.
Wozniak bought bitcoin when it was $700, over $6,700 less than where the cryptocurrency was trading on Monday, according to data from CoinDesk.
He recently sold all but one bitcoin, saying that he only wanted to experiment with the technology and not be an investor. “The Woz,” as he is often affectionately referred to, also owns two ether, the cryptocurrency associated with the Ethereum blockchain platform.
While Wozniak said that he may not necessarily believe what Dorsey predicted, he still called bitcoin “pure.”
“Bitcoin is mathematically defined, there is a certain quantity of bitcoin, there’s a way it’s distributed… and it’s 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 our human conventions,” he told CNBC.
The cryptocurrency is not actually issued by a central authority, unlike traditional currencies such as the U.S. dollar. Instead, there is a complex mathematical and cryptographic underpinning to the blockchain, the technology that underlies bitcoin. The bitcoin network is maintained by a number of players and that is why it is often referred to as decentralized.
Wozniak founded Apple with Steve Jobs in 1976 and was behind the launch of the company’s first personal computers. He spoke to CNBC at an event at the Money 20/20 conference in Amsterdam, Netherlands, hosted by Feedzai.
There are now over 1,000 cryptocurrencies in existence, but Wozniak said that bitcoin is the only one that remains “pure” because others have had to give up some of the aspects that makes bitcoin what it is, such as decentralization.
“Only bitcoin is pure digital gold… and I totally buy into that. All the others tend to give up some of the aspects of bitcoin. For example, being totally decentralized and having no central control. That’s the first one they have to give up to try to have a business model.”
Arjun Kharpal | @ArjunKharpal CNBC.COM
