“Steve Wozniak has an inventive mind, so it comes as no surprise that he’s a fan of Bitcoin,” Sujata Reddy reports for The Economic Times. “The Apple cofounder spoke at the ET GBS about what made him a fan of the cryptocurrency. ‘Bitcoins to me was a currency that was not manipulated by the governments. It is mathematical, it is pure, it can’t be altered,’ he said.”
“Unfortunately, all of this doesn’t safeguard Bitcoin from fraud,” Reddy reports. “The American inventor and philanthropist told a full house at the summit how his own Bitcoins got stolen. ‘The blockchain identifies who has bitcoins… that doesn’t mean there can’t be fraud though. I had seven bitcoins stolen from me through fraud. Somebody bought them from me online through a credit card and they cancelled the credit card payment. It was that easy! And it was from a stolen credit card number so you can never get it back.'”
“At today’s price of around $10,200 a bitcoin, Wozniak’s stolen cryptocurrency are worth roughly $71,400,” Evelyn Cheng reports for CNBC. “The American inventor remains a supporter of the cryptocurrency, which he initially bought at $700 each as an experiment, according to The Times.”
Cheng reports, “Wozniak is estimated to be worth north of $100 million.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Woz can take the hit, but it’s a good lesson: Be on the lookout for fraud!
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
“It cankt be manipulated by governments”, just by everyone else …
Sometimes Woz is too naive for his own good …
The simple truth is that state actors could easily manipulate a crypto currency and plenty of non-state actors.
Gold has long been the standard go-to refuge for storing wealth against the actions of government, but it is subject to manipulation as well. People trading in paper gold not backed by physical metal are suckers and the differential between the real thing and a slip of paper is considerable.
“It can’t be manipulated by governments”.
It’s not the government I’m worried about, it’s the banks that own the Federal Reserve. Those “private” owners are not going to let a 104 year stranglehold on the monopoly of printing money get away from them. They will do what ever they want to make sure Bitcoin is negated or they will take it over and find someway to screw us and make obscene money from it.
Bitcoin is a thieves paradise.
At some level it feeds in to a juvenile Randian fantasy where government issues currency can be ignored, but there is no security to the imaginary currency.
All currency is imaginary. That’s the whole point of having currency. Don’t forget that and think “well, this currency is real!”
But US currency has the force of law behind it. https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-f1fe5c0e55d56f9e9e536542ec8d0b57-c
While Bitcoin is effectively free of bank and government interference at the moment, these very things will keep them from becoming consumer-friendly currency.
Banks have at least some protective measures against fraud, bad cheques, etc and have ways of reversing transactions and/or getting money back, even if the process is hard and/or success rate is low. And governments can impose regulations that ensure you have at least some level of protection.
With Bitcoin, you, the end user, are your own bank. You have almost zero recourse if your funds are stolen, as happened with Woz. There is no transaction limit.
The average person is ill equipped to handle the amount of paranoia and security necessary to protect their money themselves.
How do you know that governments are not influencing Bitcoin? Explain exactly how this knowledge can be verified.
If state actors can and do hack into secured corporate and government networks, what makes you think they might not be playing around with the Tulip Bulb craze of Bitcoin?
I’m sure they are influencing them. That’s not what I said though, which was *interference*, in the sense that normal currency is regulated and/or restricted in some official, visible capacity. Although there’s some overlap between the two terms, I would hope that the context I meant would be derived by the rest of my comment.
Think of cryptocurrency as gold, because that is more-or-less how it behaves in the financial markets. No government controls the quantity of gold out there, you can mine it if you have the resources, it has inherent value that depends on the market’s perception of that value, it doesn’t require any intermediary third party in order to complete a transaction between two parties.
Most people who haven’t done any reading on bitcoin tend to think of bitcoin as one of those cashless payment systems that appeared (and vanished) during dot-com boom, such as Flooz, Beenz, DigiCash, CyberBucks, etc. Those were regulated by their respective owners, and they used regular banking system. Bitcoin is radically different, and, without taking five pages to explain how and why, the best way to understand it to treat it as gold: no banking system, no governing body, no transaction fees, no possibility of government control. About the only regulation that governments can do is make it illegal to trade (but it would be exactly the same as trying to make it illegal to trade in gold bars).
The only meaningful difference between gold and cryptocurrency is that gold is a physical object that requires physical storage and is difficult to transport, whereas cryptocurrencies are stored in a blockchain (a virtual database, spread across multiple servers, making it literally impossible to hack).
OK. How did Woz get $71,000 stolen from him?
Serious question. My two son’s keep talking about how great this is, but I have not taken the time to read up on it.
This theft in this article gives me pause because software can always be hacked. How did Woz’s situation happen?
Gold is real, has intrinsic value and is accepted worldwide. I can go into any dealer worldwide and get an agreed upon price for an ounce of Gold. That is simply not possible for Bitcoin or any other crypto currency.
Bitcoin is a thing of great use to the underground economy and is insecure and subject to manipulation by Joe or Jane Sixpack.
Gold has no actual value. It only has value because LOTS of people say, “We like and value this soft, yellow metal.”
Bitcoin has no actual value. No more than the Monopoly money in the box in my basement.
Clean water has value. Food. Work.
Intermediate tokens of exchange of value – cyber or physical – mean nothing except what a bunch of people agree to. You don’t have to “agree” to water coming under the concept of “value”. You’ll be dead in two to three days if you don’t have any.