Billionaire Mark Cuban reveals how much bitcoin he owns

Mark Cuban, an American billionaire investor who’s a regular on the TV show Shark Tank, revealed that he doesn’t own any cryptocurrency. 

Cuban appeared on fellow shark tank member Kevin O’Leary’s YouTube show, and an audience member asked him what he thinks of blockchain. O’Leary proceeded to grill him on the matter, and asked if he’d prefer to hoard gold over Bitcoin. Cuban responded: “I prefer neither right now.”

His reasoning? They’re valued in similar ways. 

“With Bitcoin, some people value it as a store of value, which makes it like baseball cards, art [and] gold.” Of gold, he said, “people want to invest in it because they think, if certain circumstances occur, there will be other potential buyers at that value.” 

He added, “When people say there’s no intrinsic value to crypto, they don’t really look at the value of blockchain,” he said. “Blockchain in general does have at least a basic intrinsic value,” but “not as high as what crypto trades for.”

That said, if Cuban’s a man of his word, then Bitcoin doesn’t have any intrinsic value. In an interview with Wired in September, 2019, Cuban said that Bitcoin has “no intrinsic value,” and that he’d rather collect bananas and baseball cards over Bitcoin. Cards can be collected, and bananas can be eaten, he said. 

He also said that crypto’s too complex to go mainstream. “Crypto is so complicated for 99 percent of the population. Do you put it in a device? Do you print it out? How do you keep from being hacked, and who’s going to host it for you?”

Evidently, Cuban won’t be one of those “institutional investors” the crypto community’s waiting for.