Market News

BY  Adam Smith

Mon, 12 July 2021, 12:53 pm·2-min read

Apple founder Steve Wozniak has said that bitcoin is the digital equivalent of gold, and the product of a “mathematical miracle”.

As reported by El Sol de Mexico, Mr Wozniak said: “Gold is limited and you have to look for it; Bitcoin is the most amazing mathematical miracle. I do not invest in Bitcoin, but I believe in it for the future”, during his presentation at the Talent Land Jalisco 2021 technology conference.

In 2020 Mr Wozniak launched “WOZX”, a cryptocurrency token developed by a company that he part-founded called Efforce, which funds ventures it claims are more eco-friendly. Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies, have been criticised for the affect it has on the environment due to the amount of energy required to mine it.

“Can we lower our energy consumption without changing out habits? This is our mission”, Mr Wozniak says in a video posted on the Efforce website. Purchasers of the cryptocurrency buy a proxy for a stake in an energy efficient project, usually infrastructure.

After the projects are financed, smart-meters record the savings made and assigns “energy credits” to the WOZX holders over the blockchain, or online ledger. These credits can then be used to offset electricity bills, or sold back to Efforce, Quartz explains.

Mr Wozniak is not the only high-profile tech founder to support the cryptocurrency. Twitter’s Jack Dorsey is also a vocal advocate, and recently announced that his payment company, Square, would be building a physical wallet to store digital coins – starting with bitcoin.

Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, is also an infamous evangelist for various digital coins, including the meme-based dogecoin. Mr Musk has had the ability to move crypto markets with his tweets, recently causing a minor cryptocurrency crash when he announced that Tesla would no longer accept bitcoin payments in exchange for the electric vehicles.