The recent bitcoin selloff and the dip of the world’s number one digital currency by market cap has several analysts and industry experts flooding the space with comments and ideas regarding where the asset will go from here, and some of them – which are surprisingly coming from Mark Cuban – are rather positive.
Mark Cuban: BTC Will Survive the Present Onslaught
It’s a bit of a shock to see Mark Cuban say anything good towards bitcoin considering he’s been a bit on the bearish side in recent years. He recently compared bitcoin to a new religion of sorts and claimed that it wouldn’t do anything for traders in “doomsday” scenarios. He further stated that anyone who though bitcoin was a store of value or a hedge tool was likely fooling themselves.
In a recent interview, Cuban claims that while he believes bitcoin to be equivalent to the dot-com bubble of the 1990s, he’s confident the world’s biggest and most popular crypto asset is going to survive in the long haul. He comments:
Watching the cryptos trade, it’s exactly like the internet stock bubble. As during the dot-com bubble, the experts try to justify whatever the pricing of the day is… I think [bitcoin], [ether], a few others will be analogous to [companies] that were built during the dot-com era. [They] survived the bubble bursting and thrived.
In other words, while most of the crypto space is suffering right now, some of the more mainstream ones – such as bitcoin, Ethereum, etc. – are likely to come out okay in the end.
The crypto space has seemingly lost about $200 billion in the last 48 hours. Bitcoin, itself, has fallen from the $40,000 range to about $33,000 at press time, which constitutes a loss of about $7,000 in just the past two days.
And while Mark Cuban is confident that the bitcoin craze is likely to continue, he’s stopping short of fully recommending it to his followers. While he has invested in companies that delve in crypto or offer digital currency services to clients, he has not – and likely will not – invest in crypto himself and believes it’s too much of a gamble.
He says:
If you’re a true adventurer and you really want to throw the Hail Mary, you might take ten percent [of your savings] and put it in bitcoin or Ethereum, but if you do that, you’ve got to pretend you’ve already lost your money.
Scarcity Vs. Demand: That’s It!
He further went on to mention that while it bears similarities with gold, BTC is purely driven by supply and demand, and this, in his mind, is not a strong enough argument to support its status as a potential hedge tool. He explains:
All the narratives about debasement, fiat, etc. are just sales pitches. The biggest sales pitch is scarcity vs. demand. That’s it.