Bids start at $ 1,000, but the price is expected to be much, much higher in the end…
British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee is selling the original source code for his most famous creation - the World Wide Web - in the form of NFT. According to the announcements, his work, which will be part of the offer of the auction house Sotheby's, lasting until the end of this month, will have a starting price of $ 1,000, but it can already be assumed that the final price will be far higher.
The profit from the sale will go to humanitarian purposes, more precisely to foundations supported by the MIT University professor and his wife, although the names of the organizations are unknown for now. The timestamped files contain 9,550 lines of the original program code written by Berners-Lee. The code has since served in the form of basic Internet structures: Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Universal Document Identified (URI). In addition to the files, a digital poster with Pyhton support that serves as a visualization of the code and contains the digital signature of its inventor, will also be part of the offer, just like a handwritten letter from Berners-Lee detailing his 1989 creation, made while working at CERN, a research laboratory in Switzerland.
"His invention created a whole new world and introduced democracy into information sharing," says Cassandra Hutton, director of the auction house's science and popular culture department.
Although the Berners code has been open since 1993, exactly two years after the first website with support for his code came to life, the auction presents an opportunity to own the ultimate, digitally born artefact.
"Three decades ago, I created something that, with the help of a large number of collaborators around the world, has become a powerful tool for humanity," Berners-Lee said. The scientist, who is also the chief technology director of the Boston start-up Inrupt, added that NFT is the ideal format and the best means of ownership that exists.
