Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak believes that bitcoin is superior to both gold and the “phony” U.S. dollar.
As reported by Bitcoin Magazine, Wozniak made this assertion at the Money 20/20 conference in Las Vegas, explaining that although bitcoin is criticized for its price volatility, it is more stable than government-backed currencies such as the U.S. dollar since it has a fixed supply, while fiat currencies can be easily diluted.
“There is a certain finite amount of bitcoin that can ever exist,” the publication cites Wozniak as saying. That makes it “more genuine and real” than the dollar, which is “kind of phony” since the U.S. government can issue new units of currency for purely political reasons.
Praising bitcoin’s utility as a store of value, he compared it to owning an appreciable asset such as a house:
“Your house has value. And if it is a house today, 40 years from now, it still is a house in value,” he said, even if the price increases over time.
In the past, investors used gold to hedge against inflationary monetary policies. However, Wozniak cautions that although there is a fixed supply of gold, continuously-improving technology will enable miners to extract gold from the earth with increased efficiency, effectively diluting the supply to an extent.
“Gold gets mined and mined and mined,” Wozniak said. “Maybe there’s a finite amount of gold in the world, but Bitcoin is even more mathematical and regulated and nobody can change mathematics.”
This view contradicts with that of investment banking giant Goldman Sachs. Though more open to bitcoin than JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs recently warned its clients that bitcoin is not the “new gold” because gold satisfies the characteristics of money better than cryptocurrency does.
Elsewhere in the discussion, Wozniak added that when he first learned about bitcoin, he admired its mathematical properties but did not understand how the blockchain worked. However, now that he thoroughly understands it, he is a major proponent of both blockchain technology and cryptocurrency.
In addition to bitcoin, he says that he is excited about smart contracts platforms like Ethereum. He believes that smart contracts will open up as many possibilities as the “tens of thousands of [software] programs” that no one could have imagined before the invention of computers.
“There is a lot more to this cryptocurrency than just the Bitcoin,” he concluded.