The “father” of the World Wide Web (Web for short), British Sir Tim Berners-Lee, sold to auction of Sotheby’s the primary source code of www instead of $ 5.43 million.
Proceeds will be donated by him and his wife to charitable causes.
The source code was auctioned off in the form of a “Non-Fungible Token” (NFT), a digital copyright certificate for things that are often non-existent, which is stored in the international digital “store” of the blockchain.
The auction, which lasted a week and “pulled” 51 bids, started with the amount of only 1,000 euros, while the winner-buyer remained anonymous.
Four different things are contained in the NFT sold, according to the BBC, the New York Times and Reuters: The time-stamped source code files (9,555 lines of code), a 30-minute animated video on how to write the code, a digital letter written this June by Berners-Lee and a digital poster of the code created by him.
“We could not sell something like this ten years ago”
Sir Tim created the WWW at CERN in 1989, linking different early information to hyperlinks. Internet. He created the first web browser and refused to patent his invention. In 1993 CERN granted all rights to the new technology for free use.
As Berners-Lee explained about the auction, “I’m not selling the Web, I’re not even selling the source code, I’re just selling an image I made of it, with a Python program I made myself, which shows what the source would look like. code if it was stuck on the wall and signed by me “.
According to the APE-MPE, Sotheby’s described the auctioned item as “the only signed copy of the code for the first web browser that existed”.
«The symbolism, the story, the fact that they come from their creator, is what makes some things valuable, and there are many people who collect items just for these reasons. We could not sell something like that ten years ago, “But now the NFT allows us to do that,” said Cassandra Hutton, vice-president of the British auction house.
He added: “Previously in the history of science there were manuscripts that you could hold in your hand. “As we progress, more and more such manuscripts are being created in digital form,” he said, adding that the code auction “does not represent any property on the World Wide Web”.
Berners-Lee, who co-founded NFT with Sotheby’s, did better than Twitter boss Jack Dorsey, who auctioned off the first tweet (also NFT-certified) for $ 2.9 million. dollars.
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