More than Gutenberg and the printing press, Thomas Edison’s light bulb or James Watson’s DNA, the World Wide Web has changed all aspects of our lives, Sotheby’s vice president Cassandra Hatton said during a presentation.
It concerns about 9,555 lines of code that the inventor of the www, the Brit Tim Berners-Lee, wrote between October 1990 and August 1991. The highest bidder can consult and download that code and the associated markup languages and protocols via a series of links in the NFT. In addition, he or she will also receive a 30-minute video in which the code is written out, a sort of ‘digital poster’ of the code with Berners-Lee’s signature and a text file dated June this year in which the computer scientist explains how the code came to be. .
It was Berners-Lee himself who approached Sotheby’s with the idea of auctioning his source code. According to the auction house, the proceeds will go to “initiatives” that Berners-Lee and his wife Rosemary Leith support.
“Ten years ago, this auction could not have been staged,” said Cassandra Hatton, referring to the NFT’s new technology. The buyer receives a digital certificate that guarantees authenticity and determines who owns an online item. Blockchain technology is used for this.
NFTs are all the rage. In the first quarter, 2 billion dollars worth of non-fungible tokens were traded, according to the specialized website NonFungible.com. For example, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey sold his first tweet at the end of March (“Just setting up my twttr”) for 2.9 million dollars. And at the end of May, the YouTube video “Charlie bit my finger” sold for 760,999 euros.
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