Sir Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web NFT fetches $5.4m at auction while rest of us gaze upon source code for $0
- Reference: 1625139011
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/07/01/world_wide_web_nft_auction/
- Source link:
Sir Tim is widely recognised as the inventor of the modern web, having proposed the melding of Hypertext with the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Domain Name System (DNS) in 1989. The late nights he spent hacking away on a NeXTcube workstation at CERN brought about the first web server, web browser, and website – and both the core concept and underlying source code were given away freely.
That latter point is, perhaps, why eyebrows were raised when Sir Tim announced he was to sell off that very same source code [1]as an NFT – an offshoot of the cryptocurrency craze in which simple hyperlinks to hosted content are cryptographically signed and assigned to an "owner" who receives, as The Register put it, "bragging rights for stuff that's public."
[2]
Yesterday, Sir Tim's NFT was successfully auctioned at Sotheby's to an anonymous bidder who paid nearly $5.5m for the privilege – which sounds like a lot, until you hear that rival auction house Christie's recently sold a single JPEG image created by the artist Beeple for a somewhat heftier $69.3m.
[3]
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For their cash the winning bidder has received an archived copy of the 9,555 lines of source code which made up the world's first HTML, HTTP, and URI implementations; an animated visualisation of the code being "typed" and riddled with errors created in the translation between Objective C and HTML for display; an SVG poster of the source code with a "graphic representation" of Sir Tim's signature; and a readme file with a letter written by Sir Tim reflecting on the work.
[5]Funny how Sir Tim Berners-Lee, famous for hyperlinks, is into NFTs, glorified hyperlinks
[6]US Treasury wants to treat cryptocurrencies like cash – as in you need to report $10k+ transactions
[7]Gone in 60 electrons: Digital art swaggers down the cul-de-sac of obsolescence
[8]We can't avoid it any longer. Here's a story about the NFT mania... aka someone bought a JPEG for $69m in Ether
Thanks to the nature of NFTs, though, all of this is readily available to non-owners: simply visit the [9]Sotheby's auction page and you too can watch the video, read the letter, and even download a high-resolution PNG version of the poster.
The fact someone has splashed out nearly $5.5m on the NFT doesn't mean the underpinnings of the World Wide Web are suddenly under private ownership, though. "This NFT is historic and singular," Sotheby's claimed ahead of bidding, "but the code for the web and its use, knowledge, power, potential will remain open and available to us all to continue to innovate, create and initiate the next technological transformation that will be built upon what we see today, that we cannot yet imagine."
"It has been fun to go back and look over the code," Sir Tim said while preparing it for auction. "It is amazing to see the things that those relatively few lines of code, with a help of an amazing growing gang of collaborators across the planet, stayed enough on track to become what the web is now.
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"I have never once felt I could relax and sit back – as the web was and is constantly changing. It is not yet the best it can be: there is always work to be done!"
Cassandra Hatton, global head of Science & Popular Culture at Sotheby's, crowed about the huge reception to the auction being a "fitting tribute" to the web daddy.
"This unique auction marked the first time a digital-born artefact has ever been offered for sale at Sotheby's, and this has to be the ultimate example of its kind – one minted by Sir Tim himself, a legend in the digital realm and far beyond, that relates to the most important invention of our era."
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Sotheby's Europe chair Oliver Barker chimed in, saying that although the source code to the web is a "digital artefact that has existed since 1990, it is not until the emergence of NFTs that something like this could ever have been harnessed for sale."
Well, quite.
"Some traditionalist commentators have dismissed NFTs as a fad and/or a bubble about to burst," said Nigel Green, deVere Group chief executive and founder, of the market for such things ahead of the auction's close. "I would suggest that these would have been the people, including some tech experts, to have also dismissed the internet in the 1990s and the likes of Amazon in the 2000s as 'hype.'
"The bottom line is that millennials and Gen Z especially have digital lives and it's natural to want to take digital representations of luxury brands, music and art into these worlds – and now they can – and this has value."
The Register was told ahead of the auction that the proceeds will be used to fund "initiatives that Sir Tim and Lady Rosemary Leith Berners-Lee support" as part of the pair's charitable works.
Sotheby's next NFT auction, for a digital artwork of Jay-Z by artist Derrick Adams, [12]closes tomorrow . The current bid stands at $35,000.
God help us all. ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/16/world_wide_web_nft_tim_berners_lee_auction/
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YN26p1zHEOu-ErunMzzqiQAAAEI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YN26p1zHEOu-ErunMzzqiQAAAEI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YN26p1zHEOu-ErunMzzqiQAAAEI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/16/world_wide_web_nft_tim_berners_lee_auction/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/21/cryptocurrency_us_treasury/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/07/something_for_the_weekend/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/12/beeple_nft_sold/
[9] https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2021/this-changed-everything-source-code-for-www-x-tim-berners-lee-an-nft/source-code-for-the-www
[10] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YN26p1zHEOu-ErunMzzqiQAAAEI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YN26p1zHEOu-ErunMzzqiQAAAEI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2021/jay-z-x-derrick-adams-heir-to-the-throne-an-nft/heir-to-the-throne
[13] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: How much do you think that I would get ...
I'm delighted that Sir Tim has taken advantage of a current fad to do something truly worthwhile, raising money for charity. Though I wouldn't have begrudged him keeping the money for himself, in recognition of his earlier gift to humanity.
Creating a commemorative package was a nice touch.
Backups?
If you shell out stupid money for an NFT like this, then surely you'll also make a backup or two of your 'valuable' possession? In which case you've just made another perfect digital copy. Every time it's transferred over a network, it's copied. The sooner this insanity ends the better.
Embarrassing
And sad.
The emperors new virtual clothes
This has become a big thing for photographers after a few made the kind of money in a single auction those selling in the traditional means could only dream off. since then it has turned into a almost cultish way with the high priests (aka the auction site owners) preaching to the converted and denigrating any heretics who have the temerity to suggest that the emperor clothes' are anything other than finest silk.
To me it feels like a hype bubble, with a few early subscribers driving the market, while the majority of people are going 'Meh'. There are also other concerns such as the legal status of the image, copyright ownership and the fact a huge amount of energy is being consumed to basically generate no real value, only virtual ones.
Of course I could be wrong and in 20 years time we will all be lovingly downloading our owned digital prints to display to our expectant descendants rather than the actual limited edition physical object. However something tells me that an original physical manifestation of say a painting will have better long term value than say the digital print of that object even if it is the only one signed by the objects creator
"The bottom line is that millennials and Gen Z especially have digital lives and it's natural to want to take digital representations of luxury brands, music and art into these worlds – and now they can – and this has value."
What? I have been able to bring digital representations of these things into the digital realm for a very long time. I still can. And that whole thing about equating NFTs to the internet...what an ass.
Yes yes, preaching to the choir, not saying anything new. I am just fablerghasted.
The bubble bursting can't come soon enough, but the speaker of that tripe will have safely found another one to inflate.
"The sooner this insanity ends the better."
Insanity like this in principle has been around and come around numerous times over several centuries. Among a rather turgid miscellany of irrelevant stuff, Charles Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions (1852) lists half a dozen instances of silly ideas that took an entire population by storm (far more extensively than NFTs), not least the South Sea Bubble of 1727, when hundreds of speculators ruined themselves buying the worthless stock of (in many cases patently) bogus companies. One such advertised itself as a company with a purpose so secret it could not be divulged. It was - they raised a huge sum by selling bogus stock and absconded to America.
On occasion, however, mass manias can have an even more harmful character. In 1731 the villagers of St. Medard started worshiping the tomb of the 17th century Jansenius, Bishop of Ypres. A cult developed involving eating earth from around Jansenius' tomb, voluntarily induced violent convulsions and " an urgent instinctive desire for certain extreme remedies, sometimes of a frightful character,--as stretching the limbs with a violence similar to that of the rack,--administering on the breast, stomach, or other parts of the body, hundreds of terrible blows with heavy weapons of wood, iron, or stone,--pressing with main force against various parts of the body with sharp-pointed swords,--pressure under enormous weights - exposure to excessive heat, etc. " [The Convulsionists of St. Medard. Hon. Robert Dale Owen, The Atlantic Monthly. VOL. XIII. Feb., 1864 in two parts].
Ultimately some 800 people fell into this cult, which did nobody any good and not a few serious physical harm. despite it having no charismatic leader. It just spread spontaneously through the population.
On the face of it a few extremely rich folk wasting their money buying a hash seems quite mundane by comparison.
How much do you think that I would get ...
if I wrapped this reply up as a NFT ? Would El-Reg sue me for a cut ?
I think that this is all a bit silly.