On Wednesday (December 22), American billionaire entrepreneur and investor Mark Cuban is offering discounts on his NBA team’s merchandise if Bitcoin is used as the means of payment.
He is the majority owner of the professional basketball team Dallas Mavericks, as well as one of the “sharks” on the highly popular reality show “Shark Tank” (which is aired on the ABC television network).
In September 2019, during a Q&A session hosted by Wired, Cuban was asked why he hates crypto.
This is was his response:
“Here’s the thing about crypto, particularly Bitcoin. Bitcoin is worth what somebody will pay for it.
“Do you ever see someone who collected baseball cards and they were really really really proud of their baseball cards because they kept on saying they were going to go up in price? Comic books, the same thing, even artwork. There’s no real intrinsic value. You can’t eat a baseball card…
“Your artwork might look good on the wall, but not much you can do with it. Bitcoin. — there’s even less you can do with it. At least I can look at my baseball card and go ‘oh that’s my favorite player; that’s Roberto Clemente.’ I can look at artwork and go ‘wow’. Crypto is the key that is so complicated for 99% of the population.
“Do you put it into device? Do you print it out? How do you keep from being hacked? Who’s going to host it for you? It’s just so difficult that it’s only worth what somebody will pay for it. So I say it’s like gold. Gold’s a religion. Now, people who are really into gold, they’ll tell you that there’s a bad depression and things go to hell in a handbasket.
“If you own gold, then you’ll be okay. No, you won’t. You carry around a gold bar, someone’s going to hit your ass, knock you out, and steal your gold bar. That’s gonna happen again and again and again. I’d rather have bananas; I can eat bananas. Crypto not so much.
“Look, I can make a great argument for blockchain. There’s a lot of applications and they’ll be used, but you don’t need public Bitcoin (BTC). You can create blockchain on your own without using all the available cryptocurrencies. It’s not that I’m against cryptocurrencies; you just have to be very careful — at best they are a store value.”
Well, yesterday, Cuban tweeted to his eight million followers that if they spend their BTC to buy Dallas Mavericks merchandise, they can now get a 25% discount.
According to a report by the Blitz Weekly, “for every $150 spent with Bitcoin on Dallasmavs.shop, fans will receive a $25 gift card with their purchase from now until Sunday, January 31.”
The report went on to say that the Mavs have been accepting Bitcoin as a means of payment for game tickets and merchandise the past 1.5 years, and that they use crypto payment processor BitPay to process Bitcoin payments.
It also had the following quote from Cuban:
“We want our fans who would like to pay with Bitcoin the opportunity to do so. BitPay allows our global fans to seamlessly make purchases with the Mavs.”
