Crypto’s speculative nature makes it ‘really dangerous’: Tim Berners-Lee

Internet inventor Tim Berners-Lee has hit out at the nascent crypto sector, saying the speculative nature of digital currencies makes them a form of gambling.

“It’s just speculative,” Berners-Lee told CNBC Beyond The Valley podcast. – It is clear that it is very dangerous.

“Investing in certain things, which are purely speculative, is not where I want to spend my time,” Berners-Lee added, comparing cryptocurrencies to the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s and early 2000s the number.

The Internet bubble was a speculative stock market bubble in which many Internet-based companies experienced rapid growth in share prices, often without generating significant profits or revenue. The bubble was fueled by hype and speculation, as investors poured money into companies without regard for their underlying business models or financial fundamentals.

Many dot-com companies relied on venture capital funding and initial public offerings (IPOs) to raise money, but many of these companies had no clear path to profitability. This speculative investment frenzy finally came to an end in 2000. When the bubble burst, the stock market experienced a sharp decline, wiping out billions of dollars of investor wealth.

Still, Berners-Lee also said that digital currencies could find a useful application in remittances if they were immediately converted into fiat currencies such as US dollars or euros.

Berners-Lee: Web3 and Web 3.0

For Berners-Lee, there is also a key difference between the popular term Web3, which refers to the third iteration of the Internet based on decentralized applications (dApps) and blockchain technology, and Web 3.0, which he sees as a way to give users control. of their own data, including how it is accessed and stored.

Berners-Lee is currently the CTO of Inrupt, the startup he co-founded with John Bruce, the former CEO of cybersecurity firm Resilient.

Solid, the web decentralization project developed by Inrupt, is described as a technology for organizing data, applications and identities on the web, which “enables richer choices for people, organizations and app developers by building on existing web standards.”

“Blockchain protocols may be good for some things, but they are not good for Solid,” Berners-Lee said in November at the Web Summit in Lisbon, explaining that blockchain protocols are “too slow, too expensive and too public,” while “ personal data Stores must be fast, cheap and private.”

“It’s a real shame that the actual Web3 name was taken by Ethereum people for the things they’re doing with the blockchain. In fact, Web3 isn’t the web at all,” he said at the time.

In particular, Berners-Lee took a much softer approach to the crypto sector in 2021 when he turned the original code of the World Wide Web into an NFT through a series of artworks.

At the time, he described NFTs as “the latest playful creations in this realm and the most expedient mode of ownership that exists.”

The NFT, titled “This Changes Everything,” eventually sold for $5.4 million at Sotheby’s.