In a recent Q&A YouTube Session with Wired magazine, the billionaire investor Mark Cuban expressed his opinion on Bitcoin(BTC)trade, digital currency and blockchain technology. He unstintingly went on the offensive against Bitcoin and cryptocurrency by comparing the most popular digital currency to baseball cards and bananas.
In the interview, Cuban was asked to respond to a twitter question that asked him to explain why he does not support the crypto asset concept. Cuban said that he had no real-world use case for cryptocurrency in to evaluate its prospects.
“Bitcoin is worth what somebody will pay for it,” Cuban said. He then compared Bitcoin to baseball cards or artwork, suggesting that these had no intrinsic value of their own, but an owner might conjecture that as time passed, the prices for these items would go up. The same holds true for Bitcoin, he said.
He went as far as to say that with baseball cards and artwork, you still have a use case in that you can admire their content and engage with it but with Bitcoin, there is not much that you can do. It has no value and no use cases. “I’d rather have bananas, I can eat bananas,” he said.
You can watch the full video here:
Against Crypto, But Still Invests in It
In the past, Cuban has been an outspoken opponent of digital assets. He labelled Facebook’s development of its cryptocurrency Libra as a ‘mistake.’ Ironically, Cuban’s investment portfolio also includes companies that are built on the blockchain and cryptocurrency concept. These include Unikrn esports, a digital token e-sports betting platform and 1confirmation, a venture capital fund for crypto. He has even confessed that he bought Bitcoin once.
Despite his occasional diatribes against Bitcoin, Cuban has conceded that he sees some value in Bitcoin’s underlying blockchain technology and confessed that he was not against the concept of cryptocurrency but just saw it as no more than a storage asset.
Cuban seems to be put off by the decentralized nature of cryptocurrency. He has said in the past that a prevalence of cryptocurrencies such as Facebook’s Libra could adversely impact the global markets and that governments or economic watchdogs will have no economic jurisdiction to control cryptocurrency trading.
Mark Cuban’s friend, Warren Buffett, another billionaire investor, has also reacted harshly to the idea of the cryptocurrency and digital wallets. In fact, Buffett has also repeated the same line that Cuban did in the video when speaking about Bitcoin. “It has no value itself”, said Buffett in one of his interviews.
