Three

The Chain Not Taken

The most important decision in the history of Curio Cards was a decision not to do something, and it was very nearly made the other way.

“So one of the first ideas we had is that we would make a copy of Ethereum call it curio Ethereum and then we own all the Ethereum, which is great.”

That is Hunt in June 2021, describing the plan they started with. In the context of 2017 it was not a stupid idea; it was the standard idea. Forking a chain and keeping the premine was, that year, among the most reliable ways in the industry to turn an afternoon’s work into a balance sheet. Creighton had done something structurally similar with Zcash and Zclassic. Hunt’s “which is great” is dry, and earned.

Then the objection:

“what we’ve been interesting about that is that the cards would have been orphaned on their own chain and no one would have been mining it and no one would been looking for them.”

A card on Curio Ethereum would have been a card on a chain that nobody validated, nobody indexed, nobody built block explorers for, and nobody would ever accidentally wander into. It would have been, in the precise technical sense, unfindable.

Which means the entire second half of this book — the rediscovery, the wrapper, OpenSea, Christie’s, Svalbard, the Wikipedia entry, the Taschen spread — exists because in early 2017 three men talked themselves out of the lucrative option.

Hunt tells this as a collective decision: “one of the first ideas we had”, “we”. Amy Castor and David Gerard, writing in June 2022, assign it:

“Creighton suggested that Curio make its own version of Ethereum for the cards. Uhrig pointed out this would leave his digital trading card idea ‘orphaned’ on its own chain, so they stayed on the public Ethereum blockchain.”

So: Creighton proposed the fork, Uhrig killed it, in that account. Hunt’s version has no author. Castor and Gerard do not say where theirs comes from, and they are the only source that attributes it. Both versions go in, and the reader can note that the word “orphaned” appears in both, which suggests they are at least describing the same conversation.

There is a second, stranger version of the same decision, and it comes four months after launch rather than before it.

By July 2017 Ethereum was being throttled by ICOs. Token sales were routinely consuming the whole network’s capacity for hours at a time; gas prices spiked; ordinary transactions failed. Curio Cards, selling pictures for a quarter, was exactly the sort of thing that got squeezed out. Hunt, live on air on 20 July 2017, said something that would be unthinkable from a project founder today:

“what we’d actually look at with Kerio cards is like Robek is saying the Ethereum network is becoming too crowded Ethereum has like the ICOs that come through and crash the whole market and make it so you can’t even use Ethereum”

“so we would look into a similar network like Ethereum that has smart contracts and then of course we would we would either move the old cards with us or we would give a bunch of the new cards to anyone that holds the old cards we’re certainly not going to leave the people behind”

Ten weeks into the project’s life, its most public founder was discussing migrating to another chain, on a livestream, and making a promise to existing holders about how they would be made whole. Had that happened, the 2017 contracts would have become a dead branch — still on chain, still readable, but superseded by a canonical set somewhere else, and almost certainly worth nothing. The claim to priority would have survived as a technicality and nothing more.

It did not happen, and the archive does not say why. The most likely answer is the dullest: the project ran out of money before it could run out of patience. Chapter eight has the commercial damage the congestion did, which is considerable, and the week of no sales it cost them.

What belongs here is the other half of the problem, because it bears on why a chain with other people on it was worth staying on and also made the product nearly unsellable. In the same conversation Robek acted out what it took for an ordinary person to buy a twenty-five-cent trading card in 2017 — chapter six has the passage, which is the funniest thing in the archive. Stripped of the joke, the sequence is this.

The buyer must open an exchange account, pass identity verification, buy a minimum quantity of a volatile asset worth three hundred dollars a unit, transfer it to a second venue to avoid fees, move it into a browser wallet that technically existed but was in beta, add a custom token contract address by hand, and send ether to an unverified contract — in order to receive a picture of a wizard worth twenty-five cents.

The onboarding was the product’s real adversary. Not scepticism, not competition, not the art. Six steps too many.

The company

There was a company, and it had at least three names.

Hunt’s memory of it is specific and comes with a complaint:

“Well, we had a little company that we’d started by then called mother dot tech and advise anyone not to buy a dot tech domain name that just cost more money.”

The documentary record both confirms and complicates this, and the way it confirms it is delightful.

On launch day, in the Bitcointalk announcement thread, somebody asked how artists could apply. At 8:36 in the evening, the MyCurioCards account posted a Google Forms link. The URL — preserved today only because it was quoted in other people’s replies before being edited out of the original — read:

https://docs.google.com/a/mother.tech/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSegSdtjtWI2v4F_es1fNprsIlAnLJhTuVRGZvp7fHTUwn99tw/viewform

That /a/mother.tech/ is a Google Workspace domain-scoped path. It is proof, dated to within hours of launch, that the team’s internal domain was mother.tech. It survives because the domain restriction broke the link for everyone outside the organisation, and a user called urmom3 replied:

“This google form says I don’t have permission to view it…”

The announcement account then reposted the form without the prefix. A broken link, seventeen minutes of mild embarrassment on a cryptocurrency forum, and the only hard evidence of the company’s internal identity, all in one exchange.

But the website said something else. Every archived capture of mycuriocards.com from 2017, and the source in the project’s own old repository, carries this footer:

© Copyright 2017 | Mothership Inc.

Not mother.tech. Mothership Inc. And a third variant — “Mothership Technology” — appears in a Crunchbase entry describing Uhrig as its cofounder and CEO, which is user-submitted and editorially unverified and therefore evidence of nothing except that somebody typed it.

So: a Workspace domain called mother.tech, a copyright line reading Mothership Inc., and an unverified bio saying Mothership Technology. No incorporation record has been checked. This book says the site’s copyright line read Mothership Inc. and the team’s Google Workspace domain was mother.tech, and declines to say which entity, if any, legally existed, until somebody pulls the California Secretary of State filing.

Who was CEO

While we are in the company’s paperwork, the question of who ran Curio Cards deserves airing early, because the answer depends entirely on which document you pick up, and because the most interesting document never rendered.

The earliest statement is the Bitcointalk post of 9 May 2017, under a heading reading “Who is Behind Curio Cards?”:

Rhett Creighton → Inventor of Curio Cards, protocol developer and researcher Thomas Hunt → Founder of MadBitcoins, World Crypto Network, The Bitcoin Group. Marketing: Purse, BTCjam Travis Uhrig → SF Bitcoin Meetup Organizer, Climateworks Foundation, Cicero Corp.

Read that carefully. On the day of launch, the project’s own announcement called Creighton the inventor, and attached Hunt’s “Founder of” to his television shows rather than to Curio Cards. Uhrig got no title at all beyond the meetup.

Four weeks later, Bitcoin.com published the first substantial press the project ever received. The headline referred to “the Creator”, singular. The photo caption read:

“Curio Cards founder and CEO, Thomas Hunt aka ‘Mad Bitcoins.’”

Uhrig and Creighton are not mentioned in the article at all.

And then there is the version nobody ever saw. The 2017 website’s HTML — in the Internet Archive and in the project’s old repository — contains a complete “The team” block wrapped in comment tags, so that it was present in the file and invisible on the page:

Travis Dean Uhrig — CEO — San Francisco Bitcoin Meetup, BitPanel, SFSU Rhett Creighton — CTO — Domus Tower, Bitcoin Core Contributor, Zclassic, MIT BS / MS Kym Donovan — COO — VP Virgin Mobile, Sabre, DVI / Georgia Tech MS / UWF MBA

Uhrig CEO, Creighton CTO, a chief operating officer nobody has ever heard of, and no Thomas Hunt.

An adjacent commented-out advisors section still holds template placeholders — one of them reads “Beedly Doodly”, and there is lorem ipsum — which strongly suggests the whole block was unfinished scaffolding, which is presumably why it was commented out rather than deleted. That is the charitable and probably correct reading. It is still a startling artefact: a startup with three cofounders, four job titles between them, a COO who appears in no other source in existence, and an org chart that was never published because somebody had not finished filling in the fake names.

Kym Donovan appears nowhere else in any source the research examined. Neither does “Michael C.”, credited in the project’s own repository README as having contributed to the smart contract alongside Creighton. Two people in the official record of Curio Cards about whom nothing further is known.

The current official line, on docs.curio.cards, lists all three as “co-founder” with distinct 2017 functions, which is the version the community settled on and which is probably the fairest. Christie’s, in 2021, dodged it entirely — the lot essay calls them “three of the IRL members of the Curio team”, uses first names only, and never says “founder” once.

The one journalist to take a firm line, Amy Castor writing with David Gerard in 2022, demoted Creighton:

“The initial founders of Curio Cards were Thomas Hunt, a bitcoin Youtuber known for the Mad Bitcoins show, and software developer Travis Uhrig. The two met at a bitcoin meetup in San Francisco.”

“Hunt and Uhrig brought in former child actor Rhett Creighton to help with developing the smart contract”

— and then, in the same article, called him “Curio founder Rhett Creighton” in a caption and noted that “All three founders were big fans of Looney’s Rare Pepe project,” in its own sentence. The piece contradicts itself twice on the point it is making.

Against which the project’s own rebuttal, in the founders series, is Uhrig’s:

“Rhett is and was a friend through the meetup group in San Francisco. He joined [Curio Cards] as an equal share member.”

Equal share. From the cofounder with the least incentive to say so.

So the decision not to fork, the near-decision to leave anyway, a company with three names, and an org chart with a fictional COO in it. None of this looks like a project about to make history, and that is the point. The thing that made Curio Cards permanent was not foresight. It was the choice, made for one good reason among several bad ones, to put thirty-one contracts on a chain that other people would keep running whether Curio Cards survived or not.

Hunt understood this perfectly well by 2021, which is when he said the sentence that should probably be carved above the whole episode:

“What matters is in the Ethereum blockchain, you can see our transactions.”