The headlines are brutal. They’re funny. They almost look fake. Just a few examples: “’Women-led’ NFT project, ‘Fame Lady Squad,’ turns out to be a bunch of dudes”; “Crypto.com wants back the $7.2 million they accidentally sent a customer last year”; “Bill Murray’s NFT charity auction nets $185,000, which is then immediately stolen”; “CoinDesk reports that Decentraland has just 38 daily active users.”
The headlines come from Web3IsGoingJustGreat, a blog that chronicles the many scams, hacks, hiccups, rug pulls, missteps and cringe of crypto and blockchain. “There are these enormous promises being made by people in the industry, of how Web3 is the future of finance and will solve every little problem” says Molly White, the 29-year-old software engineer and longtime Wikipedia editor who created and runs the site. She argues that Web3 boosters promise the future but ignore the present, that they’re “writing checks they can’t cash, and in the meantime a lot of people are taking the fall.”
White is hardly the first crypto critic. Bitcoin is “fool’s gold and anybody buying it is ultimately a fool,” said longtime crypto antagonist Peter Schiff. Non-fungible tokens are “100% based on greater fool theory,” said Bill Gates. Bitcoin is “probably rat poison squared,” said Warren Buffett. The space is a “house of cards crypto cesspool,” tweeted the economist Nouriel “Dr. Doom” Roubini, who added a poop emoji.
Most of these…
