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by ontoillogical 3185 days ago
Author here. My friend and I have been doing some smart contract audits, and we wanted to build a fun contract ourselves. We remembered the Million Dollar Homepage from 12 years ago, and decided to reimagine what it would look like today _on the blockchain_.

Not an ICO, more of an experiment / art project.

We present, the Thousand Ether Homepage: https://thousandetherhomepage.com/

The smart contract itself: https://etherscan.io/address/0xb5fe93ccfec708145d6278b0c71ce...

What’s cool about it:

- It’s immortalized on the Ethereum blockchain. As long Ethereum is around, your ad slot will be yours to do with it what you please. No need to rely on us to run the service indefinitely.

- There’s no email signups, no passwords, no credit cards.

- You buy ads by calling a method on the smart contract with the correct Ether value, and tada. All done from an Ethereum-enabled browser (like the MetaMask extension or Mist/Parity.

- Once you buy an ad, the DApp _knows_ who you are from the wallet integration and you can edit it without logging in explicitly.

---

All the code is open source, so check out the nitty gritties: https://github.com/thousandetherhomepage/

4 comments

Clever take on a vintage concept. Nice work.

Assuming you've kept the price of a pixel at 0.001 Ether, you've made 61.7 Ether.

At today's market value, that's roughly $18,000. Not bad!

> No need to rely on us to run the service indefinitely.

Elsewhere in the thread you've said that you control the domain and the presentation... so you can either get rid of or replace the page at any time or even just forget to renew the domain and someone else could take it over.

So anyone who purchases an ad is dependent on you to run the service indefinitely, right?

No. Anyone can run the same page on a different domain. The only case in which you aren't satisfied with this possibility is the one in which you truly want to place an add on the page.
Why would anyone else run the ad?
decentralized ad network? People can buy slots, get credits for showing it to users?

Not sure how that works for getting credits for display but something in that space would be interesting

I would love to start an art project that can buy me an Aston Martin :)
I did a few community cryptocoin projects, they haven't afforded me anything (yet) but served as learning experiences, I consider them art projects, there is:

YC Coin: distributed karma for HN on the Ethereum blockchain (ycco.in)

Also Facebook Coin, instagram Coin and reddit Coin (just add co.in).

Perhaps the best "art" project is www.dotcomco.in itself. If you liked the dotcom bubble you will love the cryptocoin bubble, so I mesh the two. One domain owner has contacted me willing to list their domain for sale and was willing to pay the listing price of 1BTC.

I am also an attorney and begun offering community smart contract/blockchain services (loyalty programs and asset-backed tokenization) to my clients and I use the above as my portfolio of work. So far I have had a local craft brewery interested in me developing a blockchain loyalty program and some private aircraft owners interested in creating tokens representing economic interests in their planes.

The "Fork" button is right there... :)
I think this concept is "who executes first wins". I'm looking at the guy in this thread who tweeted out the idea a while back and especially the guy who's posted his tutorial on how to create one with a tinge of sympathy ;)
I find your work very impressive.

Especially the UI flow: The user doesn't need anything, no email, no login, no payment credentials. Just Metamask and that's it.

So this could be the reference design for the next generation on-boarding.

Would you guys mind to write a blog post about how you created this project + some words about the on-boarding and if other projects have a similar seamless experience (would also give the project visibility again). Thanks!

PS: Just wondering again, is the core of the great UI rather Metamask or your work?

Metamask is just the bit that pops up to confirm your purchase. The UI is a JavaScript app done in VueJS.

Blog posts definitely coming up!