An NFT of Wikipedia’s first edit sold for more than the price of the iMac used to build the site.

On December 15, a nonfungible token (NFT) of Wikipedia’s first edit sold for $750,000 at a Christie’s auction. The 20-year-old strawberry pink iMac used to develop the online encyclopedia sold for $187,500 in a separate lot.

What does it imply that a blockchain-backed digital asset attracted four times the amount of money as a real thing related with the same historical event?

Peter Klarnet, a specialist for printed manuscripts and Americana at the 255-year-old British auction house, said:

“All I can say is that the NFT space is very dynamic and there’s still great interest in it,”

The Wikipedia NFT was a sentimental token from the early days of the internet for collectors of a particular age. “Wikipedia is an emblem for many of what the best of the internet could be,” adds Klarnet.

According to Quartz, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales wants to provide bidders a simulation of what it was like to establish a website in the early 2000s. He mentioned a “dynamic NFT” and dug out an old piece of Perl software to construct an editable web page for the Christie’s auction. “What kind of community will this attract?” Is it just going to be taken over by trolls? What if no one is interested and no one participates? Is this even going to work? “I was thinking about all of those things that morning,” he says.

Hello, world

Wales typed “Hello, World” on Jan. 15, 2001, using Perl software installed on an iMac G3, following the computer programming standard used to ensure that everything is in order.

Wales claims he kept the pink iMac all these years because he thought it will one day be worthy of a museum. “It’s still in the box, and I’ve been using it as a printer stand.” “I saved it with the hope that it might be worth something someday, like this iconic computer,” Wales says. He said that he thought the 20-year-old system in questionable functional condition would fetch a higher price than other secondhand iMac G3s on eBay.

Raising funds for a new anti-metasocial media platform

Wales intends to put the approximately $1 million he received from Christie’s sale into his three-year-old social networking firm, WT Social. “It’s still very much a pilot project,” Wales says of the difficulties of getting cash for a site with no advertising or paywalls.

He sees a “non-toxic” alternative to Facebook parent Meta’s platforms, similar to Wikipedia, where trustworthy curators oversee information and users contribute to keep it going. 

Wales said:

“It needs to be interesting and fun but I don’t want it to be addictive. It’s like a slow social-networking movement, where you might not spend all day on there, but you would spend enough time and come away with something meaningful.”

Patrick

Coincu News