WWW inventor Tim Berners-Lee is auctioning off original source code as NFT
The time-honored auction house Sotheby’s is auctioning off the original source code of the World Wide Web as NFT. This means that one of the milestones in Internet history goes to the highest bidder.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who works at Geneva’s CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, invented an early version of the WWW in 1989 as we basically still use it today. He presented a platform for documents that should be linked to one another via so-called hyperlinks and thus be easily accessible. He also developed the first browser for this new platform.
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Critic: Auction does not suit Berners-Lee
Mainly because Berners-Lee always avoided generating direct income from his invention, did not even patent it and CERN had released the invention as public domain in 1993, the announcement of the auction caused astonishment above all . First had the Financial Times reported.
Berners-Lee and his wife want to use the proceeds from the auction to support selected projects – personally, the Berners-Lees will probably not claim any share of the proceeds. In this respect, the WWW inventor remains true to himself at least on this point.
Sotheby’s hosts a seven-day auction
The auction is scheduled to begin on June 23 at 8:00 a.m. CEST with a starting bid of $ 1,000 and run through June 30. The NFT, to be purchased through the renowned auction house Sotheby’s, will contain almost 10,000 lines of code (including HTML, HTTP and URI), the original websites to explain the concept, a visualization of the code, a letter from Berners-Lee explaining the meaning, and Include a “code poster” created with Python.
Berners-Lee told Sotheby’s that he found NFTs to be the “most appropriate way” to own digital creations. The auction house, in turn, pledged it would pay carbon offsets to mitigate the environmental impact of the NFT sale.
Excerpt from Everydays: The First 5,000 Days (2021) by Beeple. (Image: Christie’s)
NFT, the non-fungible tokens, are enjoying an unprecedented, albeit highly volatile, hype in the crypto world. Non-fungible, i.e. non-exchangeable tokens – unlike a crypto-coin, for example – represent a very specific asset and are therefore unique. They only have the technology of storage on the blockchain in common with currency tokens.
NFT are ideal for assets that have only one or a few. These are currently digital trading cards, game characters, virtual stretches of land in virtual worlds or so-called crypto art. However, identity cards, vaccination cards or other important documents could also be saved and secured via the blockchain.
The auction of an NFT work of art by digital artist Beeple (Mike Winkelmann), which the British auction house Christie’s held in March 2021, clearly demonstrates that NFT has now arrived in the mainstream. The work “Everydays: The First 5,000 Days” achieved auction proceeds of 69 million US dollars and was therefore one of the top 3 most expensive works of art ever sold – as a purely digital file.
