Mark Cuban praised cryptocurrencies and Robinhood for encouraging young people to invest.- The "
Shark Tank " star comparedbitcoin to gold, and called for stablecoins to be regulated.
The "Shark Tank" investor and billionaire owner of the
Here are Cuban's 10 best quotes from the interview, lightly edited and condensed for clarity:
1. "Crypto reminds me of 1995. It's not so much about all the tokens, and all the trading, and all the frenzy that's going around - that reminds me more of the dot-com stock market. What's interesting to me about crypto is the actual networking platforms themselves, and the ability to connect with smart contracts."2. "You're seeing millions and millions of people investing in crypto, because it's far cheaper and simpler than investing in stocks. I don't think we fully understand the impact that crypto has had."
3. "Robinhood's gamification has done a lot of good, contrary to what a lot of people think. We're not going to close the income gap by taking a hammer and smashing everybody's income down, because there's no efficient way to get that money to the people who need it most. Reducing income inequality is really about enabling people to access appreciable assets."
4. "We should require digital accounts for everybody. It was hard to give millions of people their stimulus checks! That's just crazy in every way, shape, and form. You can say a lot of bad things about Robinhood and its peers, but they enable anybody of a minimum age to own an appreciable asset at a very, very low cost."
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6. "Bitcoin is a store of value, just like gold. The bitcoin maxis - the people who eat, sleep, and breathe bitcoin and think it's gonna save the world - believe that it's a reserve currency, and that when fiat crumbles for whatever reason, bitcoin will slide right in as the white knight. I don't see that at all."
7. "Gold is sold as a hedge against the apocalypse, a hedge against inflation. When there are things that look really bad, like a pandemic, it doesn't really respond. Bitcoin is the same way, it's purely a supply-and-demand play."
8. "They're gonna have to regulate stablecoins. There's just so much money there. If one of these was a Ponzi scheme or a fraud, that would create significant instability."
9. "We're in this death war between blockchains. Not all of them are going to survive. It's really going to be the applications and the innovation that drive their success, just like in the early days of the internet."
10. "Parents need to understand how kids learn today because it's different. You've gotta be on TikTok because you've gotta understand how they're consuming information. Same with YouTube. - Cuban gave the example of his son learning about gross margin and other business concepts by watching "Shark Tank" clips on TikTok.