Do you own an Ether Rock on either the broken contract or the official contract? Is your rock one of the millions of NFTs created in 2021, or is it a special one from 2017? Answering this question is not as straightforward as it may appear. Behind the question is a puzzle, and, after months…

Items with old timestamps on Ethereum are rare, and it’s reasonable to assume that all of the Ethereum relics will be considered special some day. Of course, some will be considered more special than others. It’s common to think of a blockchain relic as a piece of data such as an image, and to adopt…

An old horse on an old Etheria tile. It’s easy to visit the OpenSea website, connect your MetaMask wallet, and purchase what seems to be an old NFT. But how do you know you’ve actually collected a relic on the blockchain? What needs to happen behind the scenes for blockchain reality to line up with…

When arguing that a particular NFT is highly valued, collectors often turn to the “first” argument. They claim that theirs was the first to contain an image, or to be used in a game, or to represent a plot of land. Proof is rarely offered up, however. When the term “first” is used, it’s more…

Launched on November 29, 2015 by Alexandre Naverniouk, Ether ID was an early attempt at a name registration system for Ethereum. The system enables registrants to attach domain names to addresses. In addition, they can attach websites to their domains. Though it did not achieve widespread use like Ethereum Name Service (ENS) did, Ether ID…

In 2021, as early Ethereum projects such as CryptoPunks and Ether Rocks saw prices skyrocket, a scramble to find other early projects ensued. Some of the projects that were found date back to 2015, the year Ethereum itself came into existence. There is MistCoin, which was launched in November and was the first fungible token…

Everyone has an image of the archetypal computer nerd. Sitting permanently hunched over a keyboard, Mountain Dew by their side, they write Unix shell scripts late into the night. But there is a much rarer species of computer nerd that doesn’t draw as much attention. Members of this species are called theoretical computer scientists, or…

Devcon2, an Ethereum conference for researchers and developers, took place in Shanghai, China from September 19-21, 2016. In addition to hearing about the latest developments in the burgeoning Ethereum world, attendees had the opportunity to participate in one of the first NFT experiments. On the first morning of the conference, Piper Merriam deployed a contract…

The Ether Rock project was launched on the Ethereum blockchain in December of 2017. It is one of the oldest and most famous NFT collections on Ethereum. Some rocks even sold for millions of dollars in 2021. Despite the popularity of the project, confusion surrounds its origin story. Most in the NFT community know that…

Launched on July 29, 2016, BeerCoin is one of the oldest NFT projects on the Ethereum blockchain. It was created by Nick Johnson, the eventual founder of Ethereum Name Service (ENS), for the purpose of issuing (non-binding and just-for-fun) beer IOUs (see original announcement here). In theory, infinitely many IOUs can be issued. However, at the end…