Jimmy Wales is from Christie's.
Jimmy Wales is selling a non-fungible token based on his first edit of the free encyclopedia. The token will be sold by Christie's along with the iMac that Wales was using around the launch of the website. Wales launched a donation-backed social network in 2019.
In January of 2001 a very early version of Wikipedia was launched. He tells The Verge that what you see is what he set up the software for. The single page will be made public on the web and anyone can see and edit it. After five minutes, the changes will return to their original state, with a single edit reading "Hello, World!".
The smart contract written by the NFT grants its buyer control over the website. The buyer can change the window for reverting edits, and if they really want, they can shut down the page. They can let Wales manage the page for them.
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee sold the source code to the first web browser and donated the proceeds to charity. Wales says he was compelled by the idea of publicly recorded and verifiable ownership to keep control of the website. For the first time, we have a publicly distributed, immutable kind of database, and that is new and different, he says. Berners-Lee earned $5.4 million from his source code token, which is a highly sought-after commodity that can sell at auction for huge sums.
NFTs allow you to buy and sell ownership of unique digital items and keep track of who owns them. NFT stands for non-fungible token, and it can contain anything digital, including drawings, animated GIFs, songs, or items in video games. The NFT can be one-of-a-kind, like a real-life painting, or one copy of many, like trading cards, but the blockchain keeps track of who has ownership of the file.
Nyan Cat and the "deal with it" sunglasses are being put up for auction, as NFTs have been making headlines recently. There is a lot of discussion about the massive electricity use and environmental impacts of NFTs. If you still have questions, you can read through our FAQ.
Wales' WT.social platform is an experiment in paid social networking, but not like systems like Friends With Benefits that restrict access with high-priced cryptocurrencies. It is free to join, but members are encouraged to pay for a subscription, similar to the patronage model of Wikipedia.
Wales has a mixed relationship with the technology. He says the money raised through that has not been massive. He thinks that many of the proposed applications of the tech are misguided. Wales says that it sounds like a great way to let Exxon control what the page says about Exxon. It would be difficult to censor, but it would also be difficult to remove abusive, libelous, or privacy-invading edits.
NFTs could be used to supplement traditional ways artists make money. He points to examples of meme images being sold as NFTs, something that doesn't affect their availability but helps subjects benefit from online fame. He says that people just sharememes in violation of intellectual property rights. It is very difficult to enforce.
We are far from mainstream adoption of cryptocurrencies.
The dot-com boom and bust of the late 1990s and early 2000s were both similar to Wales, where some companies failed because they were part of a hype-filled bubble, while others simply launched with business models that weren't yet technologically feasible. Wales says that we are far from mainstream adoption of cryptocurrencies because of its inconvenient and damaging climate effects. He notes that while it is currently very energy-intensive, it is supposed to move to a more user-friendly system. A lot of use cases that people aren't really considering will start to seem more interesting as we move in that direction.
The NFT is supposed to give a glimpse into the launch of Wales' internet-changing project. The artistic concept is to take people back to that moment when I set up the website and had to think that this is so vulnerable. Anyone can do that. He says that it might destroy the whole thing and that he will be taken over by troll in five minutes.
The idea is to take people back to when I set up the website.
Wales joked about how someone could make an early version of the homepage that was defaced by troll at the NFT.NYC convention. Is it possible for anyone to sell an NFT based on an encyclopedia where all the content is free for reuse?
Wales says that he chose a moment in time before anyone else had ever touched Wikipedia because he didn't want to have a feeling that he was exploiting something. You could run afoul of trademark law if you implied an NFT was an official Wikimedia Foundation project. Wales says that it is freely licensed with everything on the internet. If you want to do anything, you can.
