Tim Berners-Lee's million-dollar code auctioned off has a flaw

British engineer Tim Berners-Lee is considered the creator of the Web as we know it. Therefore, he made news when he decided to sell an NFT with the source code of the World Wide Web.

The auction reached $5.4 million dollars and became one of the most expensive NFT of all time. It is not yet known who paid this amount, what is known is that the amount will go to different organizations that Berners-Lee supports.

The person who won the auction got a digital copy of the 10,000 lines that make up the source code of the original web browser, an animated video showing how the code was written and a letter signed by its creator.

However, Mikko Hypponen, a researcher at computer security firm F-Secure, pointed out that the auctioned code could contain an error.

According to the computer scientist, the code displayed on screen during the Sotheby’s auction had misplaced angle brackets ("<", “>”).

Hypponene said in an interview that there was no way this error could have been present in the original code.

“The NFT consists of several components and the code appears to be fine in everything else, but the video appears to have all the special characters encoded. Such code would not work and could not be compiled,” he mentioned.

Meanwhile, other developers have indicated that the error could be caused by the software the auctioneers used to pretend to write the code during the 30-minute showcase video.

For the moment, Tim Berners-Lee has not yet referred to this possible error in the code that he himself created and auctioned for millions of dollars.