The origins of the internet represented by a Non-Fungible Token (NFT) has attracted a bid worth $2.8 million as of Monday morning. It may go further up.
“Source Code for the WWW”, the name of the token that reportedly carries the original code lines of the British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee who created the World Wide Web. Languages and protocols like ‘HTML’ and ‘HTTP’ are included in the code. It allows the sites to be displayed on the web browser.
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In addition to the code lines, the NFT carries a personal letter by Berners-Lee himself speaking about the process and a digital poster and animated video representing the code. The archive is being auctioned at Sotheby’s online auction. The bid that will end on Wednesday has received forty bids so far starting at $1,000 and going up to $2.8 million.
Defending himself against critics who believe that selling the NFT does not comply with the free and open spirit of the web, Berners-Lee has said, “I’m not even selling the source code. I’m selling a picture that I made, with a Python program that I wrote myself, of what the source code would look like if it was stuck on the wall and signed by me.”