Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, gave positive comments regarding the cryptocurrencies and the blockchain technology during his opening speech at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress 2018 held in Austria’s capital city, Vienna.
According to Wozniak, the blockchain technology is a great idea. He said: “Blockchain is the next major IT revolution that is about to happen.”
Further on, Wozniak explained his positive point of view about the blockchain technology by pointing out the numerous useful applications of this emerging technology in various sectors.
According to Wozniak, the blockchain technology and the cryptocurrency will reach their maximum potential in one decade. The co-founder of Apple quoted the CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, who back in March gave a statement saying that Bitcoin would become the world’s single currency.
This is not the first time that Steve Wozniak talks positively about the cryptocurrencies and their underlying blockchain technology. During the Money 20/20 conference held in October last year in Las Vegas, Wozniak said Bitcoin was better than the gold and the United States dollar. Wozniak said: “There is a certain finite amount of bitcoin that can ever exist. Gold gets mined and mined and mined. Maybe there’s a finite amount of gold in the world, but cryptocurrency is even more mathematical and regulated and nobody can change mathematics.”
Wozniak believes the biggest advantage of Bitcoin is that there is only a limited amount of coins in circulation, while the fiduciary money, such as the US dollar or euro, can simply be printed by the banks.
However, Wozniak sold all his bitcoins except one, as he explained during the WeAreDevelopers conference in Vienna because he did not want to be an investor and constantly keeping an eye on the prices.
Wozniak’s statement that the cryptocurrencies and the blockchain technology would reach their maximum potential in one decade opens up a question about what will happen to the digital currencies after the maximum potential is reached? Some speculate this means the volatility problem would be solved, others think that all the governments would start accepting cryptocurrencies and people would use them for everyday transactions. Finally, maybe Wozniak had a different kind of potential in mind?
On the other hand, Wozniak gave an interview for Business Insider during the WeAreDevelopers conference in which he talked about what technology has become and how that bothered him. He said: “I’m bothered by what technology has become. Usually, I don’t let things bother me but what bothers me more than anything in the world is when technology goes bad. Because it ends up being on people like me, for creating something that turned out to not to be good and pure. I always want to put the human before the technology. In a company like Apple that made computers easy to use, I always thought that the user was more important than the technology. We put a lot of effort into letting people live their lives in a normal, human way.
But that “human way” is changing. We used to be able to have conversations in secret with people. If I were to say something to you in private now, others wouldn’t hear it — that isn’t the case anymore. We lost our security a long time ago. We’ve lost our privacy and it’s been abused. If I think I have a level of privacy that I don’t, that’s deceit. And that bothers me. I hit a limit. I can’t take that. It’s one step in a long series of steps that are all in the same direction.”
