The original source code for the World Wide Web sold at Sotheby\u2019s on Wednesday for $5.4 million (R77 million), up from a starting bid of just $1,000.<\/p>\n
The code was sold by Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist credited with writing the source code that forms the basis of the World Wide Web. Berners-Lee consigned the code for auction by attaching it to an NFT, a type of smart contract that uses blockchain technology.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe process of bringing this NFT to auction has offered me the opportunity to look back in time to the moment I first sat down to write this code thirty years ago, and reflect on how far the web has come since then,\u201d said Berners-Lee in a statement after the sale. \u201cI am thrilled that the initiatives Rosemary and I support will benefit from the sale of this NFT.\u201d<\/p>\n
The code was written in 1990 and 1991. For the auction, it was manifested as a salable collectible in four ways.<\/p>\n
The 9,555 lines themselves will be accessible through links coded into the NFT, through which the buyer will be able to download the code or view it online.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s also a 30-minute video, created by a graphic designer, showing the lines of code being written in full; a digital \u201cposter\u201d containing every line that\u2019s up for sale, along with a graphic of Berners-Lee\u2019s signature; and a letter from Berners-Lee about the process of creating the code.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is not until the emergence of NFTs that something like this could ever have been harnessed for sale,\u201d said Oliver Barker, the chairman of Sotheby\u2019s Europe, in a statement.<\/p>\n
A total of 51 bids were placed for the work, which had a \u201chammer\u201d price of $4.5 million; auction house fees brought the total to just over $5.4 million.<\/p>\n
Currently, the buyer is anonymous; Sotheby\u2019s couldn\u2019t immediately confirm if the buyer paid in crypto or fiat currency.<\/p>\n
The original source code for the World Wide Web sold at Sotheby\u2019s on Wednesday for $5.4 million, up from a starting bid of just $1,000.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341034,"featured_media":175683,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[44696],"tags":[70505,14365],"class_list":["post-404389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cryptocurrency","tag-nft","tag-world-wide-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/404389"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341034"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=404389"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/404389\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":404391,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/404389\/revisions\/404391"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/175683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=404389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=404389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=404389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}