Investing in crypto is ‘really dangerous,’ believes World Wide Web creator

• WWW creator Tim Berners-Lee believed that crypto is “really dangerous.”
• Berners-Lee compared crypto to the dot-com bubble, likening it to gambling.

Tim Berners-Lee, the man behind the internet as we know it today, is of the belief that crypto is “really dangerous.” The World Wide Web creator likened cryptocurrencies to gambling in a recent episode of CNBC’s Beyond the Valley podcast. 

Crypto reminds Tim of the dot-com bubble

Tim Berners-Lee, while discussing the future of the web with the podcast’s hosts, compared digital currencies to the dot-com bubble. Moreover, he compared their speculative natures.

The dot-com bubble was a speculative stock market bubble involving several internet companies in the late 1990s. After years of speculation and investment, the bubble burst in 2000, causing a sharp decline in internet stocks. 

The WWW inventor stated:

“It’s only speculative. Obviously, that’s really dangerous. Investing in certain things, which is purely speculative, isn’t what, where I want to spend my time.”

 However, Berners-Lee does see some utility in digital currencies that are used for remittances, as long as they are converted back into fiat currency immediately. 

As far as the web3 aspect of crypto is concerned, Tim Berners-Lee has his own version of a decentralized internet that gives people control over their personal data. However, his version is called “Web 3.0”, which, he argued, was different from web3 as we know it. According to him, Web 3.0 is different from its blockchain namesake. At the Lisbon Web Summit in November 2022, he stated: 

“It’s a real shame, in fact, that the actual Web3 name was taken by Ethereum folks for the stuff that they’re doing with blockchain. In fact, Web3 is not the web at all.” 

Tim Berners-Lee has dabbled around with some aspects of Web3 in the past. Back in 2021, the internet creator converted the original code of the World Wide Web into a Non-Fungible Token [NFT], describing them as:

“The latest playful creations in this realm and the most appropriate means of ownership that exists.”