Bitcoin – the number one cryptocurrency by market cap – has taken another ugly fall at the time of writing, and many are blaming Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and his latest string of comments.
BTC Takes a Nosedive Thanks to Brian Armstrong
At press time, bitcoin is trading for just over $8,300, meaning it has lost another $600 over the past 24 hours. Armstrong is now saying that it probably won’t be bitcoin that pushes the cryptocurrency arena forward, but rather a list of emerging altcoins that have garnered a lot of attention over the past few months.
On Twitter, he writes:
I think it’s still very much up in the air which blockchain will help get crypto from [around] 50 million users to about five billion. The chain that manages to ship some of these scalability, privacy, decentralized identity and developer tool solutions will have a big leg up… The good news is that there are several teams now racing toward this prize. [I’m] rooting for them all.
In a follow-up interview, Brian Armstrong compared bitcoin to Netscape, an early internet browser that came from AOL. While Netscape was once quite popular and ultimately introduced people to internet settings, other tools – i.e. Google, Yahoo, etc. – eventually emerged to outdo it, and it wasn’t long before Netscape became a thing of the past.
Armstrong believes bitcoin’s days might be numbered, and that its smaller altcoin cousins will potentially bring the industry to mainstream status. He comments:
At Netscape, they were working with early internet protocols. Things weren’t very scalable (dial up modems), you had to be somewhat technical to figure out how to get online, and early websites were relatively basic (static sites, looked like toys). Sound familiar to crypto at all?
Bloomberg editor Joe Wiesenthal added to Armstrong’s sentiment, explaining:
I’m sure he would deny it, but it’s interesting to me that the CEO of the world’s most prominent bitcoin-related company seems so skeptical of bitcoin.
This attitude, however, isn’t as out there as Wiesenthal might have us believe. We’ve seen it in other individuals including Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team. Cuban has stated that while he, himself, is not a huge bitcoin enthusiast, he does allow fans of the Mavericks to pay for tickets and merchandise using the digital currency.
Mark Cuban Has Mixed Thoughts
Last August, he mentioned:
We want our fans who would like to pay with bitcoin to have the opportunity to do so. Bit Pay allows our global fans to seamlessly make purchases with the Mavs.
At the same time, Cuban has mentioned that bitcoin is still “too difficult to use,” and that while it has a loyal heap of adoring fans, it’s not utilized by enough people to really be considered a solid payment method.