In letter
- The billionaire TV personality and owner of Dallas Mavericks weighed in on crypto.
- He’s a huge fan of DeFi in general and smart contracts in particular.
- However, he does not believe that crypto will be accepted as a currency.
In a podcast, billionaire, entrepreneur, investor, Shark cage star, and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban sat down with The Defiant to talk about why he’s so optimistic crypto in general and DeFi in particular, and why he is still skeptical about it Bitcoin as currency.
Cuban remained adamant that throughout the hour Bitcoin is not so much a currency as a store of value: “To this day I don’t believe Bitcoin will become a currency,” he stated. “What has really changed is that people have started to see that it is just a store of value.”
Cuban: A Modern Nostradamus
Cuban made several predictions that showed his optimism blockchains future. He said governments around the world can make their own digital coins because it is cheaper: “We lose money on every penny and nickel that is struck. There is so much expense and stupidity associated with how we’ve always done things. “
He called fiat money “unsustainable and unsustainable” before adding that he is not sure “if we really will see everything collapse.” However, he predicted that as governments move more into digital currencies, he can see they sell a percentage of their gold reserves and put their earnings in BTC or ETH.
He admitted that in the end he doesn’t know. “Much of this is trust: what do you trust? Who do you trust? How do you trust it? Bitcoiners rightly rely on algorithmic scarcity. And that’s okay. But there is also a lot of fundamental trust in it. You have to rely on electricity rates, availability, that no one can get to 51%. For those of you who don’t know, “51%” refers to the share of computing power needed on one blockchain network to hijack that network. At this point, it seems pretty difficult to make a takeover on that scale, but Cuban still recommends caution.
An analogy he returns to throughout the podcast compares the rise of blockchain to that of the Internet, in that there were initial, limited, early adopter uses before the whole thing became ubiquitous. Cuban looks smart contracts as the pivotal moment when crypto “just exploded” and a major threat to the banking system. For that reason he said, “Ethereum has an advantage over Bitcoin for ordinary people.”
But what are smart contracts
Be smart with Ethereum
Cuban love for it decentralized financing (DeFi) goes hand in hand with his love for it Ethereum, a blockchain created to support smart contracts. DeFi services have built a complete financial infrastructure on top of the blockchain, using smart contracts (automated blockchain contracts) to create protocols that replace existing financial services in a way that, thanks to blockchain, is unprecedentedly transparent and interoperable.
Cuban said, “Smart contracts are real and remind me of the early days of the Internet. You can do a lot of business with just HTML and a little basic JavaScript. It will be friction-free banking. It is easier to borrow in seconds. If you have $ 200 in Ether or Bitcoin and you want to pack it, and then you want to borrow $ 100 at 2.3%, you need fifteen seconds. That is unbelievable. That is really starting to disrupt the banking sector. “
None of this really comes as a surprise if you’ve been following Cuban lately. He said recently DeFi was fairer to users than the stock trading app Robinhood and, on a WallStreetBets AMA, he said DeFi could explode in the next ten years.
There you have it. Mark Cuban is optimistic about blockchain.