Inventor of the Internet Tim Berners-Lee has lashed out at the nascent crypto sector, saying that the speculative nature of digital currencies makes them a form of gambling.
“It’s only speculative,” Berners-Lee told CNBC’s Beyond The Valley podcast. “Obviously, that’s really dangerous.”
“Investing in certain things, which is purely speculative, isn’t what, where I want to spend my time,” added Berners-Lee, likening cryptocurrencies to the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s and the early 2000s.
The internet bubble was a speculative stock market bubble in which many internet-based companies experienced rapid growth in their stock prices, often without generating substantial profits or revenues. The bubble was fueled by hype and speculation, as investors poured money into companies with little 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 eventually came to an end in 2000. As the bubble burst, the stock market experienced a sharp decline, wiping out billions of dollars of investor wealth.
Still, Berners-Lee did also say that digital currencies may find a useful application in remittances if immediately converted into fiat currencies such as the U.S. dollar or the euro.
Berners-Lee: Web3 and Web 3.0
To Berners-Lee, there’s 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’s accessed and stored.
Berners-Lee is currently the CTO at Inrupt, the startup he co-founded together with John Bruce, the former
