no disagreement there from me. I mean, creating an nft costs too much in the first place for anyone hard up for cash to seriously consider.
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That’s kind of you to figure out what he “needs.”
Unfortunately, we as yet live in a non-totalitarian state.
There is nothing untoward about his participation in the market economy.
Once again, since everyone here seems bound and determined to ignore the words I’ve written:
He is not poor and is likely not doing this because he needs the money. He can do whatever dumb, trendy thing he likes.
But if YOU think he’s poor and doing this out of necessity because he was somehow “cheated” out of something he deserved for his work on WWW, then you’ve been snowed.
this was literally the first comment…
I’m pointing out he DOES NOT need cash. Nothing more.
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And you can use the same argument with any number of professions. Professional athletes (and lawyers) do not “need” more than a few hundred thousand to live. And yet we pay them the market price. What a country!
Well, hopefully it won’t come to that, brother. Hopefully, the NFT will be in the 8 or 9 figures, so TBL will be lifted out of his undeserved state of abject destitution and privation.
Weep no more! Donate HERE
So it’s a charity when he sells an nft because professional athletes and lawyers get paid?
Where is this even going now?
Some one get him a gofundme just in case the nft thing only pulls a few hundred thousand or something paltry like that then!
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I’m praying for him. Weeping for him. My god where can I donate!
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YES. I agree. The systems for how we value work is highly out of whack. Maybe open your eyes and see what is going on around you. It’s true that professional athletes are often in possession of hard fought and rare skills. But of course, one of the greatest athletes in the world (Simone Biles) does not make nearly as much as someone like Tom Brady…
People who do the critical jobs of say taking care of the elderly and young children are paid shit wages to do incredibly difficult and demanding jobs. These jobs are critical the the functioning of our society. Without them, we can’t have society. Yet the people who do them are on the verge of poverty more often then not. It is in fact a moral failing on our part that we let the “market” dictate that. We’re failing our fellow humans and throwing money at dumb shit for what exactly? To show how “superior” some are to others because they happen to have more $$$$ than someone else? What a shitty way to judge others.
Market price is not just something that magically happens, it’s shaped by a complex set of forces that don’t often reflect the real value of particular kinds of work contributes to our society. It’s fun and exciting to watch an athlete, but we should not value what they do more than the people who take care of our children and parents.
He works at Oxford and MIT. He’s fine.
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Personal rant:
I don’t subscribe to the idea that academic (or artistic, or literary, or whatever) pursuits need to be non-profit to be valuable. I don’t think anyone questions that the Web has made billionaires out of some terrible people and shuffled money into the hands of the few. Still, I don’t think that for me personally, that moves the needle one whit for me about whether or not TBL should or shouldn’t be able to take advantage of the web’s relevance to make money.
For me, the more fundamental question is: Should NFT’s be “ok” for people based on need? And my answer, unequivocally, is “no,” because it is so intensely wasteful for so little benefit, in the same way, that I’m not going to say, “Some billionaire should give 1000 families living on $1/day $100k per family to go burn down a hectare of rainforest each”. I mean, I don’t think there’s a point at which the activity can ever be justified no matter how great the need here.
I wager he could have auctioned a signed copy of the original source code, told people he’d never sign it again, and still make a killing from the auction without needing the power of a small city to do so.
So please, let’s not debate whether or not those responsible for great works in the arts or sciences “deserve” or “need” money. Let’s instead ask the question of whether or not the act itself is defensible. IMHO, it is not, regardless of whom is involved.
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If the nft is not transferred frequently then will it take much power? Is there going to be a divide in nft’s between high and low power consumption based on how often they are transferred or do I have a miss understanding of the underpinnings?
Just a sec. Gotta make an nft for my tears first to get the funds.
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Which, just to be clear, was never my argument. He’s a well-compensated academic at two highly prestigious universities. I have no comment about whether or not he “should” make money off this… my argument was that he’s not poor and hurting for cash. He doesn’t “need” it, in the way that people watching their kids go hungry or who are living on the street “need” money.
I feel the need to remind people that while TBL is a hero for his work on the WWW, there were tons of women “written out” of the history of computer science until rather recently, despite the foundational work they did on the things we all use on a daily basis.
I will also note that at the end of the day, he was compensated for his work at CERN where he developed this particular work, just like others working in fields of knowledge production.
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it’s still part of the blockchain that’s getting copied every few minutes as the servers do their updates
EDIT: I don’t think this is literally true, the Ethereum blockchain is dozens (or hundreds) of gigabytes
This NFT will just sit in the blockchain with all the others, on all the nodes, forever—if it’s never sold again, is it using electricity? The nodes are using electricity
With proof-of-work blockchains there is not really any relationship between energy use and number of transactions, so dividing one by the other gets us a meaningless number
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Thats a bad example. Two athletes in different sports at different arcs in their careers. Im sure Biles makes some hefty endorsement deals. Some inequities are going to result due to the different market forces of the different sports.
A much better complaint is made for NCAA athletes: they almost literally put their life on the line for their sport and if they are injured, or cut from the team, they lose their scholarship. All the while they are prohibited from actually earning any actual money for their efforts. They are modern day gladiators.
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Thank you
My point is we don’t give a shit about the people who do the real hard, shitty work in our society and in fact, we treat them like disposable garbage. I’m suggesting we stop doing that to anyone, whether they’re a top athlete, a pre-k teacher, an elder caregiver, or TBL - we all have something to contribute and we all deserve a comfortable living for what we contribute to society, not based on what something called “the market” dictates, but what humane ideas about the world dictate. But we have skewed priorities and we instead worship assholes with more money than any of us will ever collective have instead and beg for them to take ever more of our collective resources to ensure that their yachts have yachts…
But enjoy examining the bark, I guess.
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Funny how Sir Tim Berners-Lee, famous for hyperlinks, is into NFTs, glorified hyperlinks
[…]
Yup, another NFT. These are tokens that are embedded in a blockchain, and can be sold for millions and exchanged between traders. Buyers really aren’t getting much. Typically, the data they paid for isn’t actually stored in a blockchain, they just get a token, and the tokens include a link to the material they represent that anyone can see and access. It’s a receipt stored in an append-only database. You’re essentially bagging bragging rights for stuff that’s public.
And in the case of Sir Tim’s code, it’s definitely public: you can find at least his earliest WWW browser code here for free, web server code here for free, and the first website he crafted at CERN recreated here for free.
[…]
But that’s not all. The buyer will also have bragging rights to a black-and-white video [ what, this one, for free? – ed. ] streaming the code line by line – which, we note, contains numerous typos due to encoding angle brackets in the ObjC code as HTML – and a snapshot of the whole codebase as an SVG, and, finally, a README note written by Sir Tim.
[…]
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