Apple co-founder – Steve Wozniak says people should focus on Bitcoin value creation rather than being preoccupied with price.
The tech guru joins others in the industry to talk up the potential of the top-ranked cryptocurrency as the burgeoning ecosystem continues to take shape.
Several stakeholders since the start of the year have identified 2019 as a watershed year for digital assets with many important institutional projects set to go live during the year.
Massive Bitcoin Value Creation
Speaking to Bloomberg, Wozniak declared that Bitcoin had experienced massive value creation despite the prolonged bear market of 2018. Commenting on the matter, the Apple co-founder said:
“We’ve seen massive value destruction but we’ve seen massive value creation. I had a lot of bitcoin, but never as an investor. I only had bitcoin to experiment with and I still experiment with it on new bitcoin devices.”
Data from Coin Dance shows that BTC peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions in places like Venezuela and Indonesia are at an all-time high. Particularly for Venezuela, Bitcoin is becoming more of a necessity for people caught under the weight of a severely deteriorating economic situation.
Wozniak has several times in the past identified the significant potential of BTC. The Apple co-founder has declared that Bitcoin could become digital gold, describing the top-ranked cryptocurrency in 2018 as “amazing.” Wozniak, however, isn’t keen on blockchain technology saying it is a bubble.
Recently, some notable figures in the technology sphere have added their voices to the growing appreciation of Bitcoin. While declaring that Tesla isn’t ready to adopt cryptocurrency, CEO – Elon Musk did, however, state that Bitcoin would eventually replace fiat. According to Musk, Bitcoin’s structure that allows it to exist outside the ambit of mainstream currency controls makes it a better vehicle for value transfer than paper money.
Focus More on Utility and Not Price
For Wozniak, people should focus more on Bitcoin utility than price saying he isn’t someone who worries much about the price. In 2018, the cryptocurrency market as a whole experienced a prolonged bear market. Across the board, prices plunged by an average of 80 percent.
According to Wozniak, the focus should be more on developing useful application-cases for Bitcoin. The Apple co-founder lauded the efforts of Twitter and Square CEO, Jack Dorsey who has also recently been making positive comments about Bitcoin. Wozniak says protocol improvements like the Lightning Network is a step in the right direction towards driving increased adoption of BTC in the payments arena.
At the start of February, Dorsey declared on a podcast with Joe Rogan, that Bitcoin could probably become the native currency of the internet. For Dorsey, BTC has all the characteristics necessary to fulfill the borderless and universal nature of a single internet currency.
Currency value and adoption, Wozniak believes that developments in the industry need to be people-oriented. The difficulty associated with using cryptocurrencies for lay people continues to be one of the hindrances against broader adoption of virtual currencies. Wozniak pointed to the philosophy of his fellow Apple co-founder – the late Steve Jobs as an example of how to engineer widespread adoption of technology.
According to Wozniak, Jobs focused more on tailoring technology to the people rather than going the other way around. This philosophy, Wozniak says, was one of the driving forces behind the success of Apple, as people who didn’t care about smartphones and computers began to develop an interest.
1 Comment
Of course Steve is going to say don’t worry about price…he is a billionaire. Value is reflected in price, and you know that Steve. If not, the market corrects itself (or its rigged).