As cryptocurrencies rise and fall, there’s one number that just keeps rising. When someone loses money to a crypto scam or hack, the Grift Counter on Molly White’s blog, Web3 is just going great, spins higher and higher. Recently it ticked over $12 billion.
White started the blog in December 2021 out of frustration with mainstream crypto coverage, which she felt focused too much on stories from the rags to the rich and not enough on its dark underbelly. Her goal was to paint a more complete picture, to describe the thefts and failures, debunk the marketing narrative, and underline the risks in the process.
A software engineer by trade, White-coded Web3 is just going great over the course of a few weeks. It was just a side project, designed to “entertain me and only me,” says White; she never thought it would gain any traction. But within a few months, the blog had become a viral hit, earning White a reputation as an authoritative crypto expert.
When she first heard about crypto at a college conference in early 2010, White admired the pro-privacy and anti-censorship principles it was based on. She was excited, she says, about the potential to protect dissidents and whistleblowers from financial scrutiny and to help women whose financial dependence limits them to abusive relationships.
But by the time crypto reappeared on White’s radar a decade later, those ideas had all but faded — replaced by an emphasis on maximizing personal profit. Online, the rocketship emoji was used as a tool of hype, and “no coiners” were told to “have fun staying poor” as record numbers of people were drawn into crypto. As a result, examples of the technology being used for good are “overshadowed” by the number of people who have lost money, White says. “It’s moving the web and society in a really negative direction.”
When white started Web3 is just going great, crypto was on the rise and people were making a lot of money, which meant she found herself “raining on the parade of people who weren’t willing to get rained on,” she says. Threats, insults and personal insults started pouring into her inbox.
As a long-time Wikipedia editor, White had previously faced abuse, including threats of doxing and violence against family members over entries she wrote about the far-right in the US. Nevertheless, it still “really sucks,” she says. “That’s why this kind of behavior happens: discouraging people from being critical. A lot of people decide it’s not worth it.”
But in 2022, White and her fellow critics had their moment. A disastrous year for crypto was punctuated by a series of collapses, each of which dealt a cumulative blow to confidence in the sector. In May, the failure of the Terra Luna stablecoin sparked a chain reaction that brought down hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, cryptocurrency lender Celsius, and others. In November came the implosion of crypto exchange FTX, whose founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, has been charged with 12 criminal offenses, including fraud and money laundering.
