Mark Cuban, like many other tech magnates, has a bit of a history when it comes to his take on Bitcoin. It’s fluctuated from near total dimissal to excited embrace to… what now seems to be something of a coherent thought published on his own blog.
Back during the 2017 Bitcoin bubble, Mark Cuban was quoted as praising the asset’s scarcity. “If enough people hold and don’t sell, and enough people borrow to buy, *points hand upwards* just like we saw in the stock market,” he said in an interview with RealVision. “There’s no greater defined scarcity than Bitcoin.”
He disclosed at the time that he had some decent holdings. Then the price crashed from the $20,000 level to around $3k. His tune, unsurprisingly, changed.
More recently, Cuban was saying things like… this (check out the below video). He said “he would rather have bananas” than Bitcoin, calling it essentially an even less worthwhile store of value than baseball cards or artwork.
He also said this to Forbes a couple years ago, essentially dismissing Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies because they were just too hard:
Not because it can’t work technically, although there are challenges, it could, but rather because it’s too difficult to use, too easy to hack, way too easy to lose, too hard to understand, too hard to assess a value.
Now, finally, it seems he’s coming around to something of a coherent thought about the whole thing. He sees Bitcoin and crypto assets as effective stores of value, he’s backtracking on previous statements calling them hard to use, and most of all, he sees them as emblematic of a larger movement among the younger generation to flock toward something that can’t be manipulated by people of power and influence.
This digital store of value isn’t limited to Digital Goods of course. It has long included cryptocurrencies (CryptoAssets is what they should be called, they are rarely used as currency), like Bitcoin , Ethereum and so many others, along with the tokens being created to support De-Fi and other value creating derivatives of CryptoAssets. They all are Stores of Value with market cap leader Bitcoin having a decade plus long history of transactions and wealth generation.
And…
Its the same with CryptoAssets. Yes, wallets can be confusing, but you can figure them out. And like your gold, your silver, your coins, your stamps, your cards, the value is set by supply and demand. (for crypto nerds, the supply is set by the algorithms of the CryptoAsset)
And…
But the bottom line is that there are a growing number of investors and traders who think that the digital goods and CryptoAsset marketplaces are better than old school physical markets and the stock market and most of them are young. They love the fact that NO ONE has power over them. That there is no central authority and they get the results of their own efforts without some government agency or big company fucking with them. Every negative , consequential financial moment in their collective lives has been the result of some massive entity getting greedy and fucking things up for them.
Took you long enough, Mark. Maybe, eventually, he’ll clearly articulate how Bitcoin is valuable in that it allows people to safely store wealth with no custodian and in a small amount of space, provides access to an ecosystem of non-custodial finance, and allows people to send huge value across the world cost-effectively without the permission of third parties.