In summary
- The billionaire TV personality and owner of the Dallas Mavericks weighed in on cryptography.
- He’s a big fan of DeFi in general and smart contracts in particular.
- He does not believe that encryption will be accepted as currency, however.
In a podcast, billionaire businessman, investor, Shark Tank Dallas Mavericks star and owner Mark Cuban sat down with The Defiant to talk about why he’s optimistic cryptography in general and DeFi in particular, and why he is still skeptical about Bitcoin like a coin.
Over the hour, Cuban remained adamant that Bitcoin it is not so much a currency as a store of value: “To this day, I do not believe that Bitcoin will become a currency,” he declared. “What really changed was that people started to recognize that this is just a store of value.”
Cuban: a modern Nostradamus
Cuban made several predictions that revealed his optimism about blockchain future. He said that governments around the world can create their own digital currencies because it is cheaper: “We lose money with every penny and nickel minted. There are so many costs and stupidity associated with the way we have always done things. “
He went on to call the fiat currency “unsustainable and unsustainable” before adding that he was not sure “whether we will really see it all fall apart”. However, he predicted that as governments move more into digital currencies, he can see them selling a percentage of their gold reserves and putting their earnings in BTC or ETH.
He admitted that, ultimately, he doesn’t know. “A lot of that is trust: what do you trust? Who do you trust? How do you trust that? Bitcoiners rightly rely on algorithmic scarcity. And that’s fine. But there is also a great deal of trust. You have to trust the electricity rates, the availability, that nobody can reach 51%. ”For those who don’t know:” 51% “refers to the proportion of computing capacity needed in a blockchain network to hijack that network. At the moment, it seems very difficult to make an acquisition on this scale, but Cuban advises caution anyway.
An analogy to which he returns throughout the podcast compares the rise of blockchain to that of the Internet, in which there were initial, limited and adopting applications before everything became ubiquitous. Cuban sees smart contracts as the pivotal moment when encryption “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?
Get smart with Ethereum
Cuban love for decentralized finance (DeFi) goes hand in hand with his love for Ethereum, a blockchain that was created to support smart contracts. DeFi services have built an entire financial infrastructure on top of the blockchain, using smart contracts (automated blockchain contracts) to create protocols that replace existing financial services in ways that, thanks to the blockchain, are transparent and interoperable without precedent.
Cubano said: “Smart contracts are real and remind me of the early days of the internet. With just HTML and a little basic JavaScript, you could do a lot of business. It is becoming a friction-free banking system. It is easier to borrow in seconds. If you have $ 200 in Ether or Bitcoin and you want to wrap them up, and then you want to borrow $ 100 at 2.3%, it takes fifteen seconds. This is amazing. It really starts to disrupt the banking sector. ”
None of this is a surprise if you have been following Cuban recently. He recently said DeFi was fairer to users than the stock trading app Robinhood and, in an AMA WallStreetBets, he said DeFi can explode in the next ten years.
Here it is. Mark Cuban is optimistic about the blockchain.