Shortly before Christmas, a video went viral of Mark Cuban comparing Bitcoin to bananas and saying that is is too complicated for 99.99 percent of people. The video came from a Wired interview in September after a fan asked him, “why the hate for crypto?”
There is even less you can do with it #bitcoin than a baseball card or a painting. #MarkCuban rather have bananas. At least he can eat bananas. ? pic.twitter.com/3bqOxXKslP
— Vasko (@__vasko) December 22, 2019
Fist, he said that people can do more with baseball cards and art than they can with Bitcoin — “At least I can look at my art and go, wow.” Then, he claimed that crypto is too complicated for the vast majority of people.
Cuban also spoke to Forbes in December, before this tweet gained traction, about his new perspective on Bitcoin.
“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”
There are many examples of Cuban’s statements that help define his understanding of Bitcoin. Essentially, he used to appreciate the aspect of scarcity built into the coin, then the hype faded around returns and he didn’t feel like learning what it was actually useful for.
Like everyone else, Cuban was excited about the Bitcoin wave right before price fell from $20k to $3k. In November 2017, he told RealVision that he owned Bitcoin, and saw it as a collectable with scarcity built in.
“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 continued, “there’s no greater defined scarcity than Bitcoin.”
https://twitter.com/nikcantmine/status/1209297557802893312?s=20
Shortly after this quote, he was likely disappointed that enough people didn’t hold and that Bitcoin lost 85% of its all-time high value. This is when his rhetoric towards crypto began to change into the pessimism.
It’s understandable for someone how invested at a bad time to have a negative outlook towards what lost them money, but proving Cuban wrong can be done with a few simple bullet points.
Things that Bitcoin can do, and trading cards can’t
- Safely store millions of dollars with no custodian and in a small amount of space
- Provide access to an ecosystem of non-custodial finance
- Send value across the world without permission