Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says Bitcoin, cryptocurrency and the blockchain movement remind him of the early days of computing.
Speaking at the Crypto Invest Summit in Los Angeles, Wozniak called Bitcoin digital gold, and expanded on why he is so drawn to blockchain technology.
“You can look at Bitcoin as the example, the gold. And it’s just like – oh my gosh, no control anywhere. And it really works. People said that about small computers in the early days, ‘This won’t be anything.’ No big company would invest in it. My company Hewlett Packard turned me down five times…
Bitcoin really got our attention towards what blockchain could be. All the advantages are there because there’s no creator, there’s no owner, there’s no company involved here, there’s no central control. So it caught our attention. And everywhere I go in the world, I run into huge numbers of people that are developing different applications in life, things that we do in life, that will be on the blockchain.”
Wozniak also talked about the early days of personal computing, when huge numbers of businesses scoffed at the new technology while others saw a new world of infinite possibility.
“It takes me back to the early days of personal computers, where businesses didn’t think it’s going to be worth anything. And a bunch of us thought, ‘Oh my gosh it will be a different world if we all have computers.’ And it was such an exciting time.
We said, ‘A computer can give you more ability. It can make a person more capable than they were. They can solve their own problems, rather than turn a program into their company’s computer and let the company solve it for them.'”
On the subject of mainstream adoption, Wozniak says the adoption of disruptive and radical new technology takes time, and not every project will succeed.
“Do you actually see the disruption happening? It’s happening kind of slowly, but that was true of all the internet apps in the early days…
Every single blockchain application I hear about, whether it’s manufacturing or materials sources or the history of real estate or voting – every application I hear about is ‘Woah, this is so intriguing. Will it actually work?’ And eventually it boils out to which ones do work, and we need one bowling pin after another. And it may take a while to start it because people can’t change their ways easily to things they don’t understand fully inside.”