What just happened? The question of whether someone would pay more for an NFT version of an object than the real thing has been answered with an unequivocal no. The 1973 job application form filled in by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, which was being auctioned in both physical and NFT formats, has finished with the former making almost $320,000 more than the latter.
The single-page application for an unspecified position from the former Apple CEO went up for auction for the fourth time last week. It previously raised $18,750 in 2017, $174,757 in 2018, and $222,400 last March. On this occasion, both a physical and digital version of the application were put up for sale. There was a poll to discover which item people thought would fetch the higher price. Eighty percent of participants said it would be the paper form---they were right.
"The Steve Jobs hand-written 1973 job application auction aims to highlight the modern shift in perceived value – the physical or the digital," writes Olly Joshi, the auction's organizer.
The physical application form, which is for an unspecified position, had 43 bids and sold for $343,000 yesterday, the most anyone has ever paid for it at auction. The NFT, which was purchasable using Ethereum, attracted just 10 bids and sold for the equivalent of $23,076 at the time of sale.
We've seen some colossal NFT selling prices in recent times. A non-fungible token of the first tweet from Twitter founder Jack Dorsey went for around $2.5 million, and the world wide web's source code fetched $5.4 million. The most expensive NFT ever sold, meanwhile, remains "Everydays: The First 5000 Days," created by Mike Winkelmann, aka Beeple, which made $69 million.