Tim Berners-Lee calls cryptocurrency “dangerous” and compares it to gambling

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, called cryptocurrency “dangerous” and compared it to gambling in Beyond The Valley podcast on CNBC.

Discussing the future of the Internet, Berners-Lee said that digital currencies are “speculative” and compared them to the dotcom bubble, when the share prices of Internet companies were often not backed by real business and were highly inflated.

“It’s only speculative. Obviously, that’s really dangerous”, Berners-Lee said in an interview with CNBC. “If you want to have a kick out of gambling, basically. Investing in certain things, which is purely speculative, isn’t what, where I want to spend my time.”

Berners-Lee believes that digital currencies can be useful for remittances if they are converted back to fiat currency immediately after receipt.

British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee developed the World Wide Web and a number of technologies that made the Web a reality, but he was unhappy with how his initial vision of the Internet was being realized. Together with John Bruce, Berners-Lee aims to change the future of the Internet with his startup Inrupt, which aims to give people more control over their data.

Many supporters talk about the future of the Internet in terms of web3 – a generalized phrase that does not have a clear meaning. But supporters often say that this version of the Internet runs on blockchain technology, which first appeared with the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. Some say web3 is a decentralized internet that takes some of the power away from giants like Facebook and Google.