ERC721, Sir Tim, and Saying Hello To A Tokenized World

ERC721, Sir Tim, and Saying Hello To A Tokenized World

“Innovate, create and initiate the next technological transformation, that we cannot yet imagine”

My new passport arrived yesterday:

… and it asked me to immediately sign my name. Unfortunately, it has been a long time since anyone asked me to sign anything. So I scribbled something and moved on. The whole concept of a paper document and in signing something with a wet signature just seems to out-of-date. Why can’t I get an electronic PDF which is digital signed or a trusted version that sits in my wallet?

Recently, too, I purchased a new home (by the sea), and my conveyancer asked for my deeds. I basically had no idea where these were, and who had them. I then scrambled around the house looking for something that looked like a legal document and found some pieces of paper that seemed to define the deeds to the house. I scanned them as a PDF, and send it. “Is this it?”, “Yes. Thanks”. Pweh! In this modern time, you would think we had moved on a bit in a meaningful digital way, and where we start to create a more trusted digital world for buying something and for there to be electronic versions of the key documents we need.

Meet NFT … the copyright protector of the future?

And so we slowly move towards a more trusted digital world, and where your digital signature will have more standing than your wet signature. This will bring in a world of digital tokens, and which can be bought and sold, and which can truly prove ownership of something. For me, when I buy a car, I fill in a piece of paper or go online to register for the sale. My only proof that I own the car is that there is a database somewhere which now registers my name and address against the car. But in a tokenized world, we can transfer ownership of the crypto asset through the digital signing process, and where the previous owner of a car uses their private key to assess the car to me. I prove to everyone that I now own it using my public key. That all works well for physical assets, but what about software and digital artefacts? Well for this we have the concept of the NFT (Non-fungible Token), and where we can protect the ownership and also the creator of a digital asset. This might relate to photographs, music, or movies. The creator of the asset can thus provide digital evidence that the asset was registered at a certain time, and then can transfer this to others to own. In fact, we can get a complete timeline of its ownership.

But what about software coding? Could I prove ownership of my code with NFT? Well, yes. In a future world, we could hash a piece of code, and add it to an immutable ledger, and I can then prove that I created that code and that specific time. A crazy idea? Well, No! Sotheby’s just sold Sir Time Berners-Lee code of $5.543 million:

It includes the code he wrote in 1990/1991 and is just 9,555 lines of code. But it created HTML; HTTP and URIs, and thus built the Web. The artefact is actually an animated version of the code (in SVG format) and created by Tim. Overall it is protected by a smart contract:

0x86ade256037d80d6d42df8df96d5be21cd25bd8f

and creates an ERC-721 token on the Ethereum blockchain. The record shows that it was created on June 15, 2021 [here]:

and here is the token [here]:

ERC-721 tokens were created from the CryptoKitties project. Here is a practical example of creating these types of tokens:

The main difference between ERC20 and ERC721 is that ERC20 can produce one or more tokens, such as for cryptocurrency purposes, but ERC721 only produces a single token. For Tim, he feels that NFT provide a way to “innovate, create and initiate the next technological transformation, that we cannot yet imagine”.

If you are interested, here’s a bit of background around tokens:

and the proof of origin:

Conclusions

It will take a while, but the future is tokenized! We just need the legal professional to fully understand how public key encryption works, and we will have the legal framework in place for the protection of our citizens, and build a truly trustworthy digital work. For documents, it’s a digital signature, and for immutability, it’s a trusted ledger entry.

I am just off to get an ERC721 token for the code on asecuritysite.com.