# Why you cannot rebuild Wiki with crypto

By [Marvin Miller](https://paragraph.com/@layerzer01) · 2023-01-23

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Whenever a fresh disaster happens on the blockchain, increasingly I learn about it from the same destination: a two-month old website whose name suggests the deadpan comedy with which it chronicles the latest crises in NFTs, DAOs, and everything else happening in crypto.

Launched on December 14th, [_Web3 Is Going Just Great_](https://web3isgoinggreat.com/) is the sort of thing you almost never see any more on the internet: a cool and funny new website. Its creator and sole author is [Molly White](https://www.mollywhite.net/), a software engineer and longtime Wikipedia contributor who combs through news and crypto sites to find the day’s most prominent scams, schemes, and rug pulls.

Organized as a timeline and presented in reverse chronological order, to browse _Web3 Is Going Just Great_ is to get a sense of just how unusual an industry this is. This week alone, the site (W3IGG to its fans) has highlighted, among other things:

*   [a DAO treasury that was drained](https://web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=2022-02-14-1) in a “hostile takeover”
    
*   [an NFT project falling apart](https://web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=2022-02-13-2) amid accusations of [rug pulling](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/rug-pull)
    
*   [Coinbase’s outage](https://web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=2022-02-13-1) during the Super Bowl
    

Scrolling through the items tallies the actual costs of these issues to their victims: A “Grift Counter” in the bottom right corner adds up the value of all the losses to theft and scams that you’ve read about so far.

$8.4 billion in grift as of February 15th

More than 225,000 people have visited the site to date. It has been featured on [_Daring Fireball_](https://daringfireball.net/linked/2022/01/14/web3-is-going-just-great), among other places, and [its Twitter account](https://twitter.com/web3isgreat) has quickly amassed nearly 23,000 followers.

By White’s own admission, W3IGG has “a strong bias against web3,” and people who are more enthusiastic about crypto may find its one-sided viewpoint unfair. But White’s dryly funny, almost clinical write-ups of crypto crises make it accessible even to open-minded skeptics like myself.

I asked White if she would be up for a conversation, and happily she agreed. We talked about the site’s origins, her favorite crypto catastrophe, and why she thinks giving people financial stakes in projects will _not_ create a host of new Wikipedia-style projects, unlike what advocates of decentralization often claim.

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*Originally published on [Marvin Miller](https://paragraph.com/@layerzer01/why-you-cannot-rebuild-wiki-with-crypto)*
