It seems that no matter how hard cryptocurrency tries, it just can’t please everybody.
Kevin O’Leary Is Not a Fan
No doubt, crypto has legions of fans spread out across the world. A lot of people seem to have a thing for bitcoin and most of its major competitors, but every now and then, you come across someone who refuses to see cryptocurrency as a positive thing. They omit all the good things it has and refuse to accept any positive qualities.
One of those people is Kevin O’Leary of “Shark Tank” fame. The investor sees bitcoin as “garbage” and as a “totally useless coin,” according to the verbiage he used during a recent interview.
In a chat with CNBC, O’Leary referred to bitcoin as a “digital game,” commenting:
It is a useless currency. To me, it’s garbage, because you can’t get in and out of it in large amounts.
He explains that the major problem with bitcoin is that the receiver wants some sort of “value guarantee,” and that this guarantee simply doesn’t exist. He bases his observations off a time when he tried to use bitcoin to purchase real estate in Switzerland. Sadly, the transaction did not go through.
He states:
Let’s say you want to buy a piece of real estate for $10 million in Switzerland. They want a guarantee that the value comes back to the U.S. currency. You must somehow hedge the risk of bitcoin. That means it’s not a real currency. That means the receiver is not willing to take the risk of the volatility it has. It’s worthless.
Anyone can see that O’Leary is putting way too much emphasis on a very specific situation. First off, purchasing real estate with crypto is still a developing notion. While it has been done in the past before, it’s not an everyday occurrence, and is still relatively rare by comparison.
Second, he’s discussing property that’s not in the thousands, but in the millions. Buying a $450K house with crypto doesn’t even compare to purchasing a home that’s worth $10 million. The seller of the latter house is bound to be more cautious with crypto considering it’s still a developing asset class and not commonly used for home purchases.
This Is a Hard Situation to Judge
In addition, there’s no reason to assume that the seller really understood crypto. They just saw a volatile asset based on news reports and decided not to accept it from there. This is one situation, and a very specific one at that, and a person can argue that it doesn’t suggest the traditional nature of bitcoin or competing crypto.
Nevertheless, O’Leary remains unconvinced that it has anything special to its name. He states:
I bought all the crypto crap. I put $100 in. It’s now worth $30. That’s a 70 percent loss.