WWW Creator Calls Crypto 'Dangerous,' Likens Industry's Current Status To The Dot-Com Bubble In The 90s

Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the world wide web (WWW), has suggested that he is not a fan of the emerging sector of cryptocurrency, and aside from drawing a parallel between the industry's current status to the dot-com bubble in the 90s, he finds digital assets to be "dangerous."

During his recent appearance at CNBC's "Beyond The Valley" podcast, Berners-Lee talked about the future of the world wide web and mentioned that digital currencies are "only speculative."

"It's only speculative. Obviously, that's really dangerous," the WWW inventor told the outlet, adding that "[It's] if you want to have a kick out of gambling, basically."

Berners-Lee also said that "investing in certain things, which is purely speculative, isn't what, where I want to spend my time."

The world wide web inventor also likened the current status of the cryptocurrency industry to the dot-com bubble in the 90s where many internet stocks were highly inflated despite no solid business behind them.

Back then, internet-based companies were making waves and trending with investors pouring massive capital into them. Speculation was also on an extremely high level at the time and many of these companies failed to gain profit, resulting in a colossal crash.

However, Berners-Lee thinks that digital currencies could be useful for moving money or remittances only if they are immediately converted into fiat currency when the receiver gets them.

Aside from cryptocurrencies, Berners-Lee also shared his dissatisfaction with how his creation has panned out these days.

Last year during the Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon, the WWW creator noted that the future of the internet is not Web3 but Web 3.0, which is his proposal for molding the internet before his vision, where users' information is not controlled by corporations.

Over the years, the term Web3 has been linked to the updated version of the world wide web that is based on decentralization and blockchain technology.

Berners-Lee also shared his disappointment with how Ethereum people took the Web3 name and used it for blockchain and underlined that Web3 is not the web at all.

But, the creator of the world wide web thinks otherwise and his version, aptly called Web 3.0, is nothing like Web3 and would not embody any of that concept.

The inventor further noted that blockchain is not suitable to his version of WWW since "they are too slow, too expensive and too public."

Berners-Lee invented the world wide web in 1989. He recently collaborated with John Bruce and launched a start-up called Inrupt to reshape the future of the internet with the intention of giving people more control of their data.