Molly White is a software engineer described in a recent Washington Post profile as “the crypto currency world’s biggest critic.” The Post says of White:
On her website, Web3 is Going Just Great, White documents case after case of crypto malfeasance: investments that turn out to be scams, poorly-run projects that collapse under mismanagement and hacks that drain supporters’ money. As much of the financial and tech elite has rallied around crypto, White has led a small but scrappy group of skeptics pushing the other way whose warnings have seemed vindicated by the cratering in recent weeks of cryptocurrency prices.
White recently joined Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson to discuss whether, as her site suggests, Web3 is “an enormous grift that’s pouring lighter fluid on our already smoldering planet.”
NATHAN J. ROBINSON:
I want to start here with this notion of “Web3.” You actually started the Wikipedia entry for “Web3.” Here’s a quote from VICE:
“It can feel at times as if the entire world is pivoting into Web3, and the question is why. There are, suddenly, Web3 media companies, Web3 advertising firms, Web3 studios, Web3 marketing tactics, and Web3 publishing networks. LimeWire and MoviePass have risen from the dead, newly “powered”—as one of their CEOs put it—“by Web3 technology.” Web3 apparently is not only “transforming gaming” and “re-engineering real estate,” but also the…
