Today, Tim is 67 years old. Well, misunderstanding digital assets is a fairly common phenomenon among the older generation. Popular investor Charlie Munger, who is a vice director at Berkshire Hathaway and a loyal colleague of Warren Buffett, has been particularly notorious for it.

Earlier this month, he published an article in The Wall Street Journal calling for a ban on cryptocurrencies in the US, and called the digital assets themselves a “gambling contract” that supposedly always wins casinos.

Amusingly, Charlie himself can’t explain the reasons for his own dislike of crypto, as he clearly doesn’t understand it. This was particularly evident after a recent conversation with a CNBC spokeswoman.

She cited an archived statement by Munger from 2007, in which he said he did not want to comment on a topic because he did not understand it. The presenter asked if this approach to cryptocurrencies was relevant, and if Charlie could make a case for criticism of digital assets.

Alas, there was no adequate response. Moreover, Munger stated that people who disagree with his point of view “are idiots”. The investor’s response made it clear that he doesn’t even understand the basics of blockchain, so all of his criticism can be safely ignored.

However, Tim Berners-Lee is younger than Munger, in addition to being an early user of computers and the internet. Why would such a person be negative about digital assets?

What is the main disadvantage of cryptocurrencies

The fact that the price of Bitcoin and altcoins changes too frequently makes these assets “dangerous” for investors, says Berners-Lee. Here’s the developer’s relevant rejoinder, cited by Decrypt.

Cryptocurrencies are only used for speculation. I wouldn’t want to waste my time on things that are based entirely on the speculative nature of assets.


This is a misguided point of view. First of all, cryptocurrencies are assets that are independent of authorities, banks, officials and other centralised organisations. Accordingly, they allow the user to fully own something without fear of possible confiscation.

Also, digital assets are convenient for the transfer of value. In the current market environment, the limited inflation rate of coins, i.e. their rate of issue, is particularly important. In the case of Bitcoin, for example, a new batch of 6.25 BTC coins appears with each block approximately every ten minutes, with the rate dropping by half every four years. Well, Etherium, thanks to its commission-burning mechanism, appears to be deflationary in recent weeks, meaning that its supply is declining.


As we’ve already noted, Berners-Lee has also compared the cryptocurrency industry to the dot-com bubble. He is referring to the explosive growth of the US stock market in the late nineties, the main trigger of which was the hype around internet companies. The World Wide Web was then a relatively new phenomenon, so many firms sought to present their services using the Internet as something fundamentally new. At the same time investors paid little attention to the fundamental usefulness of such firms.

Many dot-com-era companies relied on venture capital financing and initial public offerings (IPOs) to raise money, with no clear path to profitability. The speculation and investment frenzy eventually ended in 2000. When the bubble burst, the stock market suffered a steep fall, taking billions of dollars in losses.

In the meantime, the cryptocurrency industry today is an understandable niche with various popular sectors. There's decentralised finance, allowing people to access credit without intermediaries, NFT for full power over artwork and much more. So comparisons to a bubble with no gigantic plans to grow the industry behind it are hardly relevant for cryptocurrencies.

Nevertheless, Berners-Lee also believes that digital assets can find useful applications in money transfers if they are immediately converted into traditional currencies like the US dollar or euro. Apparently, in this way, the developer expects to get rid of volatility risks. It is worth noting here, though, that volatility also allows traders and investors to make money, so there is more to it than just being unequivocally negative about it.

The main advantage of crypto is decentralisation and independence from government structures. Cryptocurrencies provide people around the world with an alternative to the traditional financial system, which has many serious problems - such as insufficient banking coverage and capital depreciation.

According to Berners-Lee, there is also a key difference between the popular term Web3, which refers to the third generation of the Internet based on decentralised applications and blockchain, and Web 3.0, which he sees as a way to give users control over their own data. In the blockchain community, however, these terms are commonly conflated.

We believe Berners-Lee has the wrong perception of cryptocurrencies. While it is true that digital assets are used by investors in an attempt to make money, there is serious technology behind them that has enormous potential to allow people to truly own their own money. So it's clearly not a good idea to view crypto solely as speculation. It is better to spend time getting to know the other important parts of the blockchain industry and understanding its prospects.