By Tim Hakki
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has lauded Bitcoin's underlying mechanics in an interview with Business Insider, describing the cryptocurrency as being "the only one that's pure-gold mathematics."
Wozniak has long been an advocate of Bitcoin; in an interview with Mexican outlet El Sol de Mexico last year, he described the world's favorite cryptocurrency as a "mathematical miracle," while speaking to Yahoo Finance, he hailed its "mathematical purity" and the fact that it "can't be modified easily with humans in control of it," unlike the U.S. dollar.
Wozniak had less glowing words for NFTs and the wider cryptocurrency space, describing it as being "so up in the air" and pointing to a track record of "rip-offs" in an over-saturated market.
"There's so many cryptocurrencies that come out now; everybody has a way to create a new one, and you have a celebrity star with it," he said. "It seems like they're just collecting a bunch of money from people who want to invest at the very earliest stage, when it's worth pennies, then they just fold."
In February, Wozniak's TV show Unicorn Hunters launched its own "dividend-paying" cryptocurrency, Unicoin.
Wozniak serves as a panelist on the show, which debuted on Amazon Prime last May. In a similar vein to The Apprentice and Dragon's Den, it sees plucky entrepreneurs pitch business ideas to seasoned investors.
Wozniak said Unicoin could serve as a gateway into the world of startup investment. "A token's flaky on its own. It could even be worth zero," Wozniak said. "I'm hoping Unicoin's very successful, but at least it's not based on zero, just based on words and talk. It's really based on the outcome of investments."
Unicoin isn't Wozniak's only venture into the cryptocurrency space. In December 2020, Wozniak launched Efforce (ticker WOZX) a cryptocurrency that promised to be "the first blockchain-based energy-saving platform," according to its website.
The premise of Efforce is simple: every WOZX token holder is investing in tokenized energy savings. Companies report their energy savings, and these savings are inscribed on the blockchain and redistributed to token holders and participating companies.
Days after Efforce's unveiling, the token hit an all-time high of $3.66. Since then, however, WOZX's price performance has been dismal, falling as low as just $0.15 last month, a crash of more than 95% from peak to trough.
It remains to be seen whether Unicoin will suffer a similar fate.