Someone actually paid $5.43M for Tim Berners-Lee's NFT of the internet's origin story
The auction has instantly boosted his net worth by over 50%.
It's hard not to feel like Sir Tim Berners-Lee is just cashing in on the hype around the ecologically unsound NFT shiz, but it's absolutely worked, to the tune of some $5,434,500.
His NFT file packet has been sold at historic auction house, Sotheby's, for a frankly offensive sum of money. The owner of some digitally signed representations of the basis for the intermawebs has not been named, but apparently half of the bidders were new to Sotheby's.
As the effective founder of the internet there is definitely a case to be made for Sir Bernster making some bank off the back of those 9,555 lines of code.
I mean, when his net worth is apparently some $10M that's just peanuts compared with the likes of Larry Page ($112B) and Sergey Brin ($109B) who kinda just took his idea and made an index. So I don't necessarily begrudge him levelling up his bank account by some 54%.
But still, wrapping his digitally signed file package—including a poster of the source code, an animated visualisation of it, the actual code itself, and a letter from Sir Timbo—into an NFT is what has gotten peoples' collective backs up.
If you're not familiar with the whole non-fungible token (NFT) thing then it's basically touted as a way for artists to ensure unique ownership of a digital asset. Which would be all well and good if it was just that simple, but there have been many cases of people misappropriating other peoples' work, wrapping it up as an NFT, and effectively stealing it officially and in perpetuity.
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The primary reason why we're so down on NFTs, however, is their use of blockchain technology to secure them. That's the same planet-destroying technology powering cryptocurrencies, which consumes so much power, and produces nothing actually worthwhile for all the damage it causes.
And has swallowed up a fair few gaming GPUs over its time too.
But I guess it could be seen as kind of hypocritical of us PC gamers to be too aggressively down on the blockchain when a power-hungry desktop rig isn't exactly ecologically sound itself...
Anyway, Sir TBL is a big fan, claiming it as "totally aligned with the values of the web." Though I'm not sure he's really referring to the ecological impact of the wider Ethereum network that's often used to mint NFTs.