Nine

Nobody Understands What I’m Saying

The quiet years have a measurement, and it is the cleanest finding in this whole archive because it required no interpretation at all. Hunt’s own Curio Cards posts, counted by year from his Twitter archive:

2017 — dozens. 2018 — four. 2019 — none. 2020 — none.

Two full calendar years in which a co-founder of what would be called the first art NFT collection on Ethereum did not mention it once. Not a retrospective, not an anniversary, not a joke. The silence is not an absence of evidence; in an archive this complete, the silence is the evidence.

The four

It is worth listing what 2018 consisted of, because all four are in the record and together they take about a minute to read.

28 February 2018 — a retweet of the project account:

“RT @MyCurioCards: The first Dapp submitted by a raccoon. https://www.stateofthedapps.com/dapps/curio-cards”

The raccoon is Curio, the Fiverr-commissioned mascot. The joke is that the project’s public face was getting itself listed in a directory of decentralised applications.

19 April 2018 — a retweet of Travis Uhrig, and the only contemporaneous trace of something Hunt would later half-remember:

“RT @travisformayor: Shameless plug / exciting update: We just launched the first round of community voting on new curio cards today! 21 ne…”

The archive truncates it there. What matters is that it happened and that it is dated: in April 2018, nearly a year after launch and months after Hunt had started speaking of the project in the past tense, Travis Uhrig ran a community vote on new cards. Hunt’s own recollection of this, years later, is the recollection of a man reading his own history off a ledger:

“There was a vote that I saw later on, I’ve looked around recently and it looks like they burnt an Ethereum to have a vote”

“an Ethereum” is ether. A vote that I saw later on. He found out about it by looking at the chain, afterwards, like a researcher. The tweet above is him retweeting the announcement at the time — so he knew in April 2018, and by 2021 the knowing had gone, and what remained was an inference from burned ether.

25 July 2018 — four words:

“this is my thesis! Curio Cards FTW!”

24 July 2018 — the day before, on air, the footnote. Chapter ten is about what the footnote says; what belongs here is what happened immediately after he said it, which was nothing. The caller replied that ERC-721 did not matter and that anything on Ethereum would be in trouble within three years, and the segment ended, and that was the high point of the year.

Travis Uhrig, alone, taking the shop sign down

While Hunt moved on, Uhrig kept the thing alive, and the most interesting decision of the quiet years is his: he deliberately made Curio Cards harder to buy.

Hunt describes it:

“Travis edited the webpage to remove the ability to go to the vending machines because you know we didn’t want people to buy these sadly worthless cards”

Uhrig’s own version:

“I had to buy them because you know the shop was closed you know if I could have turned off the vending machines I would have.”¹

His reasoning is the part that should be read twice:

“Because it is like it is almost like a liability at that point. Because I don’t know what’s going to happen to that money is just kind of sitting there”

The vending machines still worked. Anyone who found them could send ether and receive a card. Uhrig could not switch them off — chapter seven explains why, and it is the same reason card 17b survived: the contracts had no owner function and no off switch. So he did the only thing available, which was to remove the signposts. Not because the cards were a scam, but because selling people something he believed to be worthless felt wrong, and because incoming money he had no plan for was a problem rather than revenue.

This is the single most consequential act of the quiet years and it is an act of restraint. He hid a working shop because he did not want anyone to shop there. The direct consequence, three years later, is that the vending machines had to be rediscovered rather than merely used — and that is the entire premise of chapter eleven.

One more small thing from the same period, which explains a detail everyone later found suspicious:

“Their card wasn’t available on your scan not out of any like hatred of open source was just more like it wasn’t important at the time.”

“your scan” is Etherscan; “Their card” is probably the code. The vending-machine source was never verified publicly on Etherscan. In 2021 that looked like concealment. It was not. It was a man in 2017 and 2018 not bothering with a step that nobody then considered important.

CryptoKitties, and the year it all went somewhere else

The thing that took the oxygen arrived in the same calendar year as Curio Cards and Hunt is not gracious about it:

“I already you know I was already kind of bitter about crypto kitties right because that comes out in the same year”

The bitterness is understandable and the comparison he reaches for is more revealing than the resentment. In January 2018, with a caller asking him about CryptoKitties, he explained the whole category — and he explained it well:

“But what’s so great about Curio cards or crypto kitties is that they can prove that they’re cryptographically rare. And they can say we printed one of these cards or we printed a hundred of these cards. And that’s all they’re ever going to be.”

That is a correct and compact statement of why any of this matters, delivered in January 2018 by a man whose own version of it had just failed. And then, in the same conversation, he reached for the other comparison:

“But when you look at something like a crypto kitty or a curio card, it’s a lot like a beanie baby. You believe that the beanie baby have value, so you pay a lot of money for it on eBay. The company prints a certain number.”

A Beanie Baby. In January 2018 the co-creator of Curio Cards compared his own cards to a collectible-toy bubble, in public, approvingly-but-not-quite. It is the least promotional thing a founder has ever said about his own product and it is also, as a piece of analysis, hard to argue with.

Note what is doing the work in both quotes: not art, not priority, not provenance. Printing a certain number and proving it. Chapter fifteen comes back to this, because it turns out to be the thing that survived.

The room that went silent

Which brings us to the sentence this chapter is named for.

In early 2021, before anything had happened, Hunt was in a Clubhouse room — the audio app that briefly held the attention of everyone in crypto that winter — and he mentioned what he had done:

“Well you know 2017 I made a bunch at these and we were referenced in the ERC 721 spec and and the just dead silence for the room nobody understands what I’m saying”

The repetition and the collapsing grammar are the sound of a man describing an embarrassment.

Travis Uhrig describes an almost identical Clubhouse moment independently. Two founders, separately, in the weeks before the rediscovery, telling rooms full of NFT enthusiasts that they had made art NFTs on Ethereum in 2017 and being met with nothing.

It is worth being precise about why the room went quiet, because the obvious reading — that nobody believed him — is probably wrong. The likelier reading is that in early 2021 the sentence we were referenced in the ERC-721 spec did not parse as a claim about anything. There was no frame in which it was interesting. The category “early NFT” barely existed as a collectible idea; the archaeology that would create that category was a few weeks away. He was giving a correct answer to a question nobody had asked yet.

And the answer was not even correct in the way he thought. He believed the spec had cited Curio Cards admiringly. Chapter ten is about what it actually says.

What the silence was worth

The temptation here is to make the quiet years tragic, and the archive resists that, because the people in it are mostly just getting on with other things. Chapter eight has Uhrig’s flat summary of the whole episode; the detail that belongs here is the one that stings most, reported by Amy Castor and David Gerard — that he “could barely give the virtual cards away on a Discord channel.” A founder of the collection that would sell at Christie’s for 393 ether could not persuade people in a chat room to accept the cards for free.

But here is the thing the quiet years actually did. They sealed the project — contracts live, supply mostly unsold, links removed, founders dispersed, no marketing, no price, no attention, for four years. Chapter fifteen argues that this, and not anything anyone did on purpose, is what made the cards valuable.

Hunt says it himself, and he says it as a man who cannot quite believe the mechanism:

“It’s that four-year gap. It’s that time that’s made them presumably valuable.”

Which is a strange thing to have to accept about your own work — that its value came not from anything you did but from the length of time during which nobody cared.

Two notes for the record before the story turns. First: two items in Hunt’s archive from this period are screenshots of Twitter rather than archived tweets, and one of them appears to show a well-known technologist asserting in June 2018 that CryptoPunks and Curio Cards “were first”. It is optical character recognition of a photograph of a screen, it is truncated mid-sentence, and this book does not quote it or name the person, because an OCR’d screenshot is not a retrievable verbatim source and the standard set in the note on sources does not bend for a convenient find. It is recorded in the apparatus as a lead worth chasing: if the original tweet can be retrieved, it would be the earliest third-party priority claim in the corpus, and it predates the rediscovery by nearly three years.

Second: the same screenshot set contains what looks like an artist thanking Hunt in July 2018 for a Curio Cards contest win, which would corroborate the April 2018 community vote from the other side. Same treatment. Same reason.