Ethereum Could Be the Next Apple: Steve Wozniak

Blockchain platform Ethereum could be the next Apple, one of the iconic tech company’s co-founders said this week.

According to Forbes, Steve Wozniak made this bullish prediction in front of 5,000 people at this week’s WeAreDevelopers conference in Vienna.

“Ethereum interests me because it can do things and because it’s a platform,” he said, adding that it could prove to be as influential as Apple over the long-term.

At present, Apple has a market cap of $921 billion, which makes it approximately two-and-a-half times larger than the entire cryptocurrency market cap. Ethereum’s market cap is slightly below $68 billion.

As CCN reported, Wozniak has long been a fan of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. In the past, he has praised bitcoin in particular for its utility as a store of value.

“There is a certain finite amount of bitcoin that can ever exist,” he said at the Money 20/20 conference last October. That makes it “more genuine and real” than the dollar, which is “kind of phony” since it is often manipulated for political reasons. “Your house has value. And if it is a house today, 40 years from now, it still is a house in value, even if the price increases over time,” he added.

Wozniak has also said that bitcoin ranks favorably to gold:

“Gold gets mined and mined and mined. Maybe there’s a finite amount of gold in the world, but Bitcoin is even more mathematical and regulated and nobody can change mathematics.”

Despite this bullish outlook, Wozniak said that he divested most of his holdings after finding that he spent too much time and energy following its volatile price movements.

Unfortunately, he accidentally sold many of those coins to a scammer who paid with a stolen credit card. The payment was reversed by the actual cardholder, leaving Wozniak approximately 7 BTC in the hole.

Wozniak, meanwhile, continues to hold one bitcoin and two ether, funds that he says he uses to experiment with the technology — not as a speculative investment.