He created the World Wide Web – and sold it
The man described as the founder of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has joined artists, developers, musicians etc benefitting from the booming interest in NTF – a blockchain-based non fungible token. Sotheby’s auctions has sold the source code for the World Wide Web for USD 5.4 million with the auction house stating that this is the first historical artefact relating to the creation of the web to ever come to sale.
“Bidding opened on June 23 at just USD 1 000 and over the course of the sale, the NFT attracted a total of 51 bids, with 60% of the bidders new to Sotheby’s. Offered directly by Sir Tim Berners-Lee himself, proceeds from the sale will benefit initiatives that Sir Tim and Lady Berners-Lee support, the auction house said in a statement.
The winner who put up USD 5.4 million gets 9 555 lines of code written in 1990-1991, an animated visualisation of the code, a digital poster of the code, and a digital letter written by Berners-Lee in June 2021.
“As people seemed to appreciate autographed versions of books, now we have NFT technology, I thought it could be fun to make an autographed copy of the original code of the first web browser”, Berners-Lee writes.
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