This interview has been edited and condensed.
‘Jimmy Wales is good at failure.’ Who would think that? Apparently, Jimmy would, as this is the message he was spreading during his speech at the biggest crypto conference in Europe, Blockshow, calling failure ‘an essential part of innovation.’ But the importance of not giving up is also clear from his speech, as the co-founder of multilingual online encyclopedia shared that Wikipedia was not his first project, but the most successful one so far.
Speaking in Berlin, the headliner of the event, announced his new project that everybody was waiting (I mean, not a single sзще in the audience!) - WikiTribune, that Jimmy described as ”all about bringing high-quality neutral journalism to the world.”
Jimmy Wales giving a speech at Blockshow in Berlin, Germany, May 2018. Image source: Blockshow[1]
And what about crypto?
Catherine Ross: During your speech, you’ve called crypto a bubble, and you’ve also expressed this opinion in different interviews. Why do you think so?
Jimmy Wales: I’m old now, and I was in the internet world during the dot-com bubble, so when I say something is a bubble, it doesn’t mean that I think there’s nothing of value there. It means there’s a lot of noise and there’s a lot of investment money flowing in, and a lot of things are being invested into what does not actually make sense. A lot of projects are going to fail, but we additionally have a lot of scams, a lot of theft, a lot of crazy things happening. So, I just ask people to be careful.
CR: Well, that’s fair. Are you a crypto investor yourself?
JW: No, I’m not. I have had some crypto here and there, but I’m not an investor at all, so
