Sothebys Auction of Source Code for WWW X Tim Berners-Lee NFT | Hacker News Reader

Sothebys Auction of Source Code for WWW X Tim Berners-Lee NFT

sothebys.com

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Today's word is potlatch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potlatch

"A potlatch involves giving away or destroying wealth or valuable items in order to demonstrate a leader's wealth and power."

Or, in the current parlance, a "flex".

There seems to be something about modern art specifically where collectors value something more highly when it's palpably inane--the $58M for Jeff Koons' balloon dog springs to mind. It puts more focus on the fact that the collector not only had that much money, but could throw it away on something visibly and obviously "worthless" to almost anyone else.

I think a lot of the attraction to NFTs is this "flex"--they're totally arbitrary and the only thing "original" about them is that someone, somewhere on a blockchain minted one (rather than the artist themselves creating only one original, for example).

what are some of your favorite sculptures?

The animated source code is incorrect because all ">" are, ironically, HTML encoded as ">" which appears in every use of "->"

Hilarious. I wonder if they’ll fix it before it “ships”

This does NOT seem to be the actual code. There was some translation program in the middle of the process that changed some of the text. For example, look for &GT; which is an encoding of the GREATER THAN symbol.

Yes, that's exactly what I was pointing out. I even used > instead of < as my example.

The entire NFT phenomenon just shows how little dollars are worth nowadays. That dollars can be thrown away on claims, and not even real property (even tulips were worth something) is proof of this.

In terms of bold NFT claims, you can claim to be Emperor of the Milky Way for $15 million.

https://opensea.io/assets/0x495f947276749ce646f68ac8c2484200...

The value of a currency is not measured by the least useful thing that can be bought with it, but by the most useful. Dollars were still good for getting my kitchen remodeled this spring.

I'm deep into cryptocurrencies / blockchain tech and still don't see the appeal of current generation NFTs. Anyone have a positive perspective they can share?

Currently, NFT is about collecting and speculation, which is currently the exact same use case as many collectibles like baseball cards. I believe the space will evolve to allow NFT holders to have additional rights and utility, such as copyright and ability to earn royalties from licensing the art.

NFT is simply provable ownership of a digital asset. What that asset actually is and what it provides is an experimental and evolving space. I think HNers need to think less narrow about this.

I think the gaming and mass-market collectible space will be huge. See NBA Topshot for a recent successful example (~$300 million in sales this year) https://nbatopshot.com/

> NFT is simply provable ownership of a digital asset.

No. NFTs are provable ownership of a token representing a digital asset, but not ownership of the asset itself. Buying an NFT doesn't confer copyright ownership, for example. Nothing prevents minters from just lying about their ownership of an asset, and they do.

I'm not sure I follow you. According to ERC-721 spec, there is a token owner, and it is assigned to a blockchain address. Signing a message with that address proves you own it. If the source code of the smart contract shows that no one can seize it from you, then you are indeed the owner.

What an NFT actually is can be different for every token. Nothing stops the creator of an image from declaring the owner of the NFT the owner of the copyright. Like I said, I think this is an area of future innovation.

But right now, ownership of the NFT declares ownership of the NFT. What you can do with that is where companies and software engineers are experimenting. It is a very raw, early space that is exceedingly well-funded, and I expect many clever inventions to come out of it.

> I'm not sure I follow you. According to ERC-721 spec, there is a token owner, and it is assigned to a blockchain address. Signing a message with that address proves you own it. If the source code of the smart contract shows that no one can seize it from you, then you are indeed the owner.

Anybody can sell a NFT of the Mona Lisa. It's worthless.

Anyone can sell a proof of ownership of the Mona Lisa, too. That doesn't mean that the proof of ownership in the Louvre is worthless.

> Anyone can sell a proof of ownership of the Mona Lisa, too. That doesn't mean that the proof of ownership in the Louvre is worthless.

Except that there is only one Mona Lisa, the painting. There can be as many NFT of Mona Lisa as one wants. It's worthless, and your proof is a proof of ownership of something worthless. Good luck defending your ownership of a NFT in a court of law.

If you steal the proof of ownership of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre, do you think they'd give the Mona Lisa to you?

Traditional art is 90% money laundering and recent laws worldwide have attempted to address that with AML/KYC. I believe that is one of the reasons we have seen a huge influx of money into NFTs.

> Traditional art is 90% money laundering

Is this a real number or did you just make it up?

73% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

It's a scam, no more, no less. Just like ICOs. People poured billions in ICOs a few years ago because of FOMO, the only people that got rich is the ones that did the coin offering.

NFTs are a tool. If they can convince regulators they are art, then they can be donated, and you can write it off on your taxes. You just need a service that produces estimates of value.

The one good thing about NFTs is the ability to manipulate prices legally (just like they do with art), and create arbitrary value out of nothing.

If the main point of cryptos is speculation, not payments, then NFTs are a better crypto. You can better inflate them and sell them, the only problem is you need to create demand, which is harder if you are not a celeb. Better to partner with someone well known and split the profits.

Sotheby's and other art dealers are not regulated by the BSA. They are not considered money exchangers since art isn't considered a financial asset.

They do have a voluntary BSA compliance program, but voluntary doesn't mean mandatory.

Can NFTs really be sold as 'art' or are they just a crypto? I think they are cryptos since they point to an art file at a url. Art has to be visual, or at least experienced, so the machine code or source code that encodes the digital art, even if put inside the NFT itself would still not be art.

Since NFT is a crypto, doesn't matter if just 1, or 1 of many, Sothebys is doing money transmission when it auctions NFTs.

Does owning the NFT actually grant you any copyright claim or protection in the USA?

Not even a little

No.

NFTs are functionally-identical to owning a print with a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist, I'd say.

> NFTs are functionally-identical to owning a print with a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist, I'd say.

No, you don't have to own/create a piece of art to make an NFT of a piece of art at first place.

Does the artist need to be involved with an NFT though? I thought Joe Shmoe could make and sell one if he so pleased.

Joe Shmoe could also autograph a book he didn't write, it just wouldn't be very valuable.

No, but the market will price an NFT of the Mona Lisa minted by John Doe much less than an NFT of the Mona Lisa minted by Michelangelo.

Not even close. NFT functionally is scrap of paper with an address of an apartment where print with a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist is located. A unique scrap of paper, sure :)

NFTs alone don't do anything special, other than enable trading of NFTs.

The NFT basically has a "memo" field where the issuer can put a link to a website that says "This NFT represents the source code for the world wide web", but that's it. You don't actually get or own anything beyond the NFT.

You can think of it like a digital baseball card that represents something. The advantage is that it's digitally unique and can be traded on the blockchain.

It's likely that these high dollar auctions come attached to contracts with additional stipulations beyond the NFT. I wouldn't be surprised if those contracts included clauses that allowed re-issue of the NFT in the event that it's lose or stolen, for example.

And what if the website goes offline? Can't the information be stored on the blockchain directly to avoid this point of failure?

Storage on the blockchain is too limited and too expensive to put the actual media files there. Afaik that's because the verification nodes need to have a copy of the current state of the VM, which contains everything ever stored on the chain / by smart contracts.

If they are selling it as an art, sure they can, at least, handle “<” “&” properly?

Who wants to buy a piece of art that can’t compile? ;-)

Impressive that TBL wrote all the code for the WWW in 30:25.

So has anyone minted an NFT for the bitcoin PDF yet?

A NFT only has value if it's endorsed by the creator. ie. if you mint a NFT for the bitcoin whitepaper but you can't prove you're satoshi then it will be worthless. Seeing how satoshi hasn't been spotted in years, the chances of that happening to be slim.

> A NFT only has value if it's endorsed by the creator.

Not according to the market: https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7vxe7/people-are-stealing-a...

Though it might be a little harder to pretend that you're Satoshi.

"I'd buy that for a dollar."

fools and their money are soon parted

I think that's possibly an obscure reference to Robocop, though I don't know what it's supposed to mean.

https://youtu.be/85cL1HisrNc

I think Linus Torvalds do a similar auction of Linux. (Assuming this doesn't change the status of Linux, and it will still be free and open source.)

I like reading how Sothebys tries to phrase the listing:

>Work includes:

>Original archive of dated and time-stamped files containing the source code

>Animated visualization of the code being written >A Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) representation of the full code (A0 841mm wide by 1189 mm high)

>A letter written in the README.md file (in “markdown” format) by Sir Tim in June of 2021, reflecting upon the code and his process of creating it

Cool, so some text files, a video of code and a picture of the code. You could make a script that automatically mints NFTs out of GitHub repos if that's worth... checks listing 1,200,000 USD.

1.7MM now.

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