Parmy Olson, Columnist

Web3 Just Had Its Emperor’s-New-Clothes Moment

A respected cryptographer pointed to a critical flaw in NFTs and other “distributed” tech in a devastating critique.

January 11, 2022 at 5:40 AM EST

Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is author of “We Are Anonymous.”

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Web3, or Web 3.0, has become the latest craze for investors who fear missing out. Hotter than Bitcoin, harder to understand than artificial intelligence and also painfully abstract, Web3 points to a more transparent, decentralized and equitable web, which in principle is better than an internet controlled by a handful of mega corporations.

This idea for the next iteration of the web is a terrific concept, but one that, like communism, can’t really work in its current form.

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