Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak hopes Bitcoin will become global currency | Hacker News Reader

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak hopes Bitcoin will become global currency

cnbc.com

50 pointsca98am7923 comments

Yeah, I'm not putting any weight behind this... ask him something more concrete like how to reduce the chip count on your disk drive controller.

It won’t though. It’s a terrible currency.

It will, it is an excellent currency

I encourage everyone who supports Bitcoin to speak out about it! It makes it easy to know whose opinions to take with a pillar of salt.

I encourage everyone who supports Bitcoin to actually use it as a currency, instead of a sketchy investment vehicle

I wrote about it with kind of an amateur's perspective https://raedisch.net/articles/bitcoin and am actively seeking discussions. Most people are guarded (rightfully so) possibly in fear of being burned. There are very few people in my vicinity that I can have constructive debate over Bitcoin with. In case you could be one of them and are ever near Hamburg, please feel free to contact me!

With all due respect to the guy but asking him is the equivalent of asking some random person on the street. He isn't an economist, civil servant or researcher who has actually invested significant thought on the matter. He is just someone who founded Apple decades ago and hasn't done much since.

Also it's really just a terrible idea. The volatility, the fraud and ease of theft, the lack of connection to something physical, the fact it undermines banks whom serve an important purpose. No thanks.

He's a brilliant engineer, but, yes... His opinions are not informed ones on this matter.

If he is a brilliant engineer then he probably has done his research on that matter and has come to this conclusion. If he had no idea or at least wasn't informed enough he probably wouldn't comment on it.

As an engineer, I must warn you we tend to think we understand things better than we actually do. It's a professional hazard one learns to avoid with time and painful scars.

> the lack of connection to something physical

Do you get paid in something physical? Do you think there are notes or precious metals sitting in a safe somewhere that you just never use? I suggest you study money. Also don't use the word whom unless you know how to.

I am referring to the use of Bitcoin as a mass market currency. Physical currency is still useful in many situations where there is (a) no/intermittent networking, (b) when the cost of the purchase is less than the financial overheads and (c) for truly anonymous purchases.

I could keep going. There is a reason that even in countries like Australia where we have widspread tap to pay that cash is still pervasive.

Go to China. I do not carry cash at all.

There's no reason bitcoin can't coexist with physical currency. An interesting question is if bitcoin were accepted everywhere, what would people trust more? Bitcoin or bits of paper printed by the government?

I agree with most of your points, except with volatility. If bitcoin becomes a global currency then it will have a much higher market cap than now and global support. This means it will have equivalent volatility to the dollar or euro. As adoption increases, volatility decreases.

"the lack of connection to something physical" - one can also argue about this. Money in your bank account is pretty much virtual too. If everybody right now wanted to withdraw their money from their bank account into physical money, we wouldn't be able to do that. There just aren't enough paper notes. Far from it in fact, it wouldn't even be remotely possible.

The biggest hinderance to bitcoin becoming a global currency in my opinion is the fact that governments are very scared of having a currency which they cannot control. Printing money is a wonderful thing to have for governments.

> governments are very scared of having a currency which they cannot control

And for a good reason. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bullion_Famine as one of the examples.

Bitcoin becoming a global currency would set us about 500 years back when precious metals were the global currency.

That article is irrelevant with regard to cryptocurrencies as they are near-infinitely divisible. There could never be such a "famine".

So are precious metals near-infinitely divisible.

Not sure what point you are trying to bring across.

He may have done his research and came to that conclusion, he isn't claiming to be an economist, civil servant or researcher.

Also, no one is forcing you to use Bitcoin, Your government, however, forces you to use the state-controlled money.

I never said he was claiming to be anything. But the media is covering him because he's the ex-founder of Apple not because his opinion has some unique merit.

You actually defending banks here? The architects of financial crash after financial crash?

Is bitcoin not already a global currency?

Wozniak was a pretty amazing guy. Not sure what hes been up to lately.

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