After Twitter founder Jack Dorsey auctioned his first tweet another digital signature that is creating much stir is British computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s original source code of World Wide Web. The digital-born artefact will be auctioned as an NFT(Non Fungible Token) at Sotheby’s. The bidding starts at 1,000 USD and will go on for seven days starting June 23.
The NFT will be composed of four elements, an animated visualisation of the code by Berner-Lee, an original time-stamped file with the source code, a digital poster of the full code from the original files using Python, a letter written by Sir Tim reflecting on the code and process of creating it, all these elements digitally signed.
The original source code has 9,555 lines within the file referenced by the NFT and deals with the process of implementing the three languages, HTML, HTTP and URIs and protocols first written by Sir Berner-Lee.
According to Sir Berners-Lee, since he has been a computer scientist, it is a natural thing for him to digitally sign on a completely digital artefact and put it for auction as an NFT. The money from the auction will go into initiatives he and Lady Berners-Lee support.