The ever-outspoken Jimmy Wales conducted an interview with BusinessInsider in which he proclaimed that: Wikipedia are “absolutely never” going to hold “cryptocurrency or ICO ambitions”, despite the popularity such means found elsewhere as a means of public crowdfunding.
This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise however, due to the fact that the man has long been outspoken against blockchain and cryptocurrencies in general. At a presentation Wales gave at a Berlin blockchain conference earlier this year, he made the bold claim that “The Crypto World is Absolutely, Definitely in a Bubble”.
He even reflected this sentiment in the interview in question, when he responded that cryptocurrency is “clearly a bubble with a lot of mania and hype around it”.
Jimmy Wales: A Man with a Mission
Whilst he may be best known as the disputed founder (or co-founder) of Wikipedia, Wales stands behind an empire of accomplishments that can be best summarized under the ‘Wiki’ moniker that has adorned almost all of his established web properties.
The latest of these, and one that appears to be his primary concern at present is one which he started in 2017. It’s called WikiTribune, and it clearly carries on the family name – if not all of the associated principles.
WikiTribune: PolitiFact meets Snopes?
WikiTribune is a for-profit company which posits itself as a website which promotes, encourages, and works towards “Evidence-based Journalism” as a means of combatting ‘fake news’.
In stark contrast to its original coinage by US President Donald Trump, WikiTribune appears equipped to achieve its goals with a team of mainstream media veterans and hard -left pundits – such as Charles Anderson and Fiona Mcleod.
A hypothesis all-but-confirmed by the prevalence of stories such as ‘English, the language with gender bias: Who to blame, dictionaries or people?’ on their website.
They certainly have the popular search engines covered: with all results for the query ‘WikiTribune’ being dominated by praise published by global and national-level news corporations, if not being owned outright by the WikiTribune itself.
Is Crypto a Bubble?
Recent news suggests that he could be correct, with the market falling after Bitcoin dropped from a healthy position above $8000 down to $7,630 by the time of writing, which is sure to fuel the flames of FUD during this dip in this roller-coaster of a market.
As we have seen many times before though, it is more than likely that this is just another one of those down moments before we get to enjoy another complimentary bull-run. A phenomenon which we’ve been reporting on since 2016.
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