Apple co-founder: Bitcoin is better than gold and the US dollar, and there are countless opportunities for blockchain

Steve Wozniak, or Woz for short, thinks Bitcoin is better than gold and the U.S. dollar, which he calls a “fraud” because the government can always print more.

On October 22, 2017, at Money20/20 in Las Vegas, Apple co-founder Woz was interviewed by CNBC technology reporter Deirdre Bosa and shared his thoughts on cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. The topic of the conversation was originally about artificial intelligence, but the topic of Bitcoin also came up during the conversation.

Woz believes that a currency is more “stable” when it cannot be diluted, and while Bitcoin has a fixed total supply (only 21 million in total), government-issued fiat currencies cannot do that.

Woz said that "Bitcoin has a definite total amount," while the U.S. government can print more dollars for political reasons. He described the dollar as a "fraud" in some sense, and Bitcoin as "more real."

At the same time, he also said that gold does not necessarily have a fixed supply, because humans will always continue to find more efficient ways to dig gold from the earth.

Woz said:

“Gold will be mined, mined, mined. There may be a finite amount of gold on earth, but Bitcoin is more mathematical and regulated, and no one can change its mathematics.”

He likens owning Bitcoin to owning a house. “Your house has value. If you own a house now, it will still be a valuable house 40 years from now,” even if house prices rise and governments impose more property taxes.

Mathematical Appreciation

Woz said he has “admired” Bitcoin since it first came onto the scene.

“I view Bitcoin as a form of money,” he said, adding that he didn’t initially understand the underlying technology but now does.

He said he initially had trouble buying bitcoin because it required setting up a special bank account, a process he said was "very awkward and prevented him from becoming an early bitcoin holder." When he was finally able to buy bitcoin, its price promptly plunged by half.

But these numbers don't mean much to Woz. "I'm not a financial guy," he said. He has never followed the price of Bitcoin, or Apple's stock price, and he was attracted to Bitcoin because it is based on mathematics.

He said:

"My wife and I, we judge hotel rooms by the number of doors they have, not by what's inside them. We're both mathematicians."

The opportunities for blockchain technology are numerous

Woz also discussed Bitcoin’s underlying blockchain technology and its importance in allowing people to transparently track items, such as minerals.

“There are constant conflicts over mineral resources among countries around the world, and you don’t want to buy conflicting minerals. So how do you avoid that? He went on to explain how companies usually buy gold from different countries and smelt it, making it impossible to know where the gold comes from. However, with blockchain-based solutions, it will be possible to track the origin of gold.”

He added:

“They are adopting this technology so that all payments can only go to good legal sources, so there are no conflict minerals.”

Woz pointed out that many of the current applications using blockchain technology are different from what people initially imagined, and this requires time to adapt.

He also likened the introduction of smart contract platforms like Ethereum to the advent of computers, where suddenly people were writing “thousands and thousands of programs” that no one had imagined before. Smart contract platforms are opening up some opportunities.