Curio  A Little Footnote in the Code

A Little Footnote in the Code

Curio Cards, and what it means to be first

The structure as built. All fifteen chapters are written. Four editorial decisions were taken in Thomas’s absence and are flagged at the end for cheap reversal.

The title

From Thomas Hunt on the Bitcoin Talk Show, 24 July 2018, talking about Curio Cards being named in the ERC-721 standard:

“So it’s pretty cool where we’re a little footnote in the code of Ethereum forever now. Pretty cool for a little startup type project.”

He was right that it was a footnote. The research turned up what the footnote actually says — and it says Curio Cards are not the thing being standardised. The gap between what he thought the footnote meant and what it says is the book’s spine, so the line is the title.

Alternative, if you’d rather lead with the sadder joke: Dying on the Vine, also yours, 20 July 2017, about your own cards failing to sell in the same week Robek’s sold out overnight.

The shape, and why

The obvious structure is chronological: 2017, the quiet years, 2021. The material supports that, but chronology alone wastes the best thing in the archive — that you were broadcasting the whole way through, so the book can cut between what you said at the time and what you said later, and let the reader watch memory work.

So: chronological spine, with two running threads.

  1. The claim. “First art NFT on Ethereum” gets argued about in the archive from 2018 to 2026. Rather than settle it in chapter one or dodge it, it recurs, gets harder, and gets its own chapter near the end.
  2. The record versus the memory. Where your recollection and the documents differ — and they differ a lot, usually on numbers — both go in, visibly. The archive produced about thirty such divergences. They are an asset, not an embarrassment.

Five parts, fifteen chapters, plus apparatus.

Front matter

A note on sources — written. What the four source-types are and how each is marked: your own words at the time, other people’s sourced words, documented fact, and my connective tissue. Includes the honest problem: the show transcripts are Whisper output with no speaker labels and real errors (“rowback” for Robek, “Cypress” for Cyprus, “a theorem” for ether), so every spoken quote carries its episode and date, speaker attribution is stated with a confidence level, and nothing is silently cleaned up.

Prologue — 17:22:51 UTC — written

The launch as a verifiable instant. The factory contract at 17:18:04 UTC on 9 May 2017; card 1, Apples, four minutes and forty-seven seconds later; the IPFS hash sitting inside the constructor arguments where anyone can still read it. Then the Bitcointalk post, the Reddit post, your tweet at 19:57 UTC, and the “SOLD OUT” at 22:05. A day documented to the second, that almost nobody noticed.

Part I — Before

1. Joey Coin — written. Where the idea came from, by your own account: Andreas Antonopoulos on a World Crypto Network show saying kids would one day trade Joey coin and Freddie coin; a lifetime of collecting baseball cards, comics, CDs; Rare Pepe on Counterparty as the thing to admire and to differ from. Travis’s “three parents” formulation — Rare Pepe, the Bitcoin art show, Dogecoin — set against your own version.

2. Free Beer and Pizza — written. The San Francisco Bitcoin Meetup, run by Isabelle and Paige; you as organiser, then Travis; the 2016 art show the cards grew out of; cryptograffiti walking up and saying he made art about crypto; Rick Chan and Ryan Singer both telling you to meet Rhett Creighton; the nuclear engineer who was also the kid in Crocodile Dundee II.

3. The Chain Not Taken — written. Why Ethereum, answered properly. The first idea was to fork Ethereum and keep all the ether — and the reason it was dropped is the reason the book exists: cards on their own chain would have been orphaned, unmined, unfindable. Also: mother.tech, Mothership Inc., and what the entity actually was.

Part II — 2017

4. New Card Tuesday — written. The machinery. One contract per card; zero decimals, so a card is indivisible; separate “vending machine” contracts you sent ether to and got a card back from; MyCurioWallet, a MyEtherWallet fork; images on IPFS; EtherDelta as the only secondary market. The 100,000-card warehouse and the weekly burn that produced the odd supply numbers. Tiered pricing at 25c / 50c / $1 and why it stopped. The weekly show.

5. All Proceeds Go to the Artist — written. The seven artists and the thirty cards, using the authoritative mapping (Phneep 1–10, 14–16, 20; cryptograffiti 11–13; Cryptopop/Luis Buenaventura 17–19; Robek World 21–23; Daniel Friedman 24–26; Marisol Vengas 27–29; Thoros of Myr 30). The founding promise, printed on the 2017 site, that all proceeds went to the artist — and the evidence it was kept. Marisol Vengas as Max Infeld’s alias, and Christie’s getting it wrong in print. Card 26, Education, 111 copies: the smallest run, which nobody knew was the important one.

6. The Wizard, the Bard and the Barbarian — written. Robek’s three cards, July 2017, caricaturing you, Travis and Rhett. The set selling out overnight; the artist checking his sales in the car before breakfast; the whale who bought around 336 of card 21 and has never been identified; “about eight people hold all of them total combined”; your own Mad Bitcoins card sitting there dying on the vine in the same week. Built on the contemporaneous interview of 20 July 2017 — the single best primary source in the archive.

7. Two Seventeens — written. Card 17, UASF, and card 17b. Both deployed 20 June 2017; 17b went up fourteen hours and forty-five minutes earlier, through a different factory. What the accident was, where the accounts diverge (your “Rhett told me he screwed up the contract” against Travis’s “there’s no 17B, what is that, you’re getting scammed”), and the coincidence that the duplicate landed on the card about a chain fork.

8. Dying on the Vine — written. The failure, in detail and without softening. ICO congestion costing a week of sales; the fear that you had accidentally done thirty ICOs and the SEC was coming; no lawyers and no money; “I still really like Curio Cards and would like to raise VC”, 25 May 2017; the artists you could not afford to buy cards from; and the project going bankrupt.

Part III — The Quiet

9. Nobody Understands What I’m Saying — written. 2018 to early 2021. Travis alone keeping the site up; the April 2018 community vote on new cards; the vending-machine links taken down deliberately, because selling worthless cards to people felt wrong; CryptoKitties arriving the same year and taking everything; the Clubhouse room in early 2021 where you mention being in the ERC-721 spec and get dead silence. The archive itself is evidence here: 2017 has dozens of Curio posts, 2018 has four, 2019 and 2020 essentially none.

10. Not the Thing — written. The footnote, done properly. Dieter Shirley’s November 2017 draft; William Entriken carrying the sentence into the EIP file in January 2018; what it actually says — that “limited edition, collectible tokens” like Curio Cards and Rare Pepe are not distinguishable assets; the second mention in the references, linking mycuriocards.com; and the fact that in 398 comments on the standard, nobody discussed Curio Cards once. Your 2018 “we’re in the spec, we did it” against the sentence itself. Also corrects the project’s own claim that ERC-1155 references Curio Cards. It does not.

Part IV — Found

11. The Thirteenth of March — written. MoonCats on the 12th, Curio the next day, Etheria two days later. @DieAping finding the vending machines in the website’s git history; Harry BTC publishing a how-to; Adam McBride’s thread; the vending machines drained inside a day. The single decisive fact: the person who found it told everyone instead of quietly buying the lot. Your “got any cards?” DMs, independently remembered by four people.

12. When You’re Older Than the Thing — written. Travis’s eight-word explanation of why a wrapper was needed. The rushed community wrapper with the fatal bug; cards sent in and locked forever; five copies of card 26 among them, which is why the maximum number of complete sets dropped from 111 to 106. A chapter about preservation costing something.

13. Lot One — written. Christie’s, 1 October 2021. First lot of Post-War to Present; Rahul Kadakia on the rostrum; the first Christie’s sale with live bidding in ether. 320 ETH hammer, 393 ETH with premium, $1,267,320 — and why the two figures are the same sale, which almost every retelling muddles. Sotheby’s two weeks later. Svalbard. And the Christie’s lot essay making a bigger claim than you ever did.

Part V — The Claim

14. First — written. The whole question, laid out honestly. Terra Nullius, August 2015. Etheria, October 2015 — and Etheria’s own 2015 copy calling itself the first virtual world, not the first NFT, exactly the retrospective move Curio’s claim depends on. PixelMap, November 2016, which nobody on any side has ever reasoned through, and which is the live gap. CryptoPunks V1 on 9 June 2017 — thirty days after Curio, not six weeks; the six-weeks figure quietly measures to the 22 June relaunch. Larva Labs changing its own site from “the first” to “one of the earliest” sometime between March and October 2021. Where the press hedged and where it did not. And your own position, from 2021: “If there’s one earlier than Curio cards and it’s in the blockchain, I’m not going to fight it. I know what the truth is.”

15. What the Chain Remembers — written. The four-year gap as the thing that created the value. The vindication that arrived too late to be a business and just in time to be history. “People collected sets of the things that we made to be collected into sets.” And “Collecting is intensely human,” which you posted on 26 September 2017, to no one.

Apparatus

  • The Quote Bank — built. Every quote with exact words, date, source, retrievable reference, and a verification note.
  • The Cards — built. All 31, with title, artist, supply as the project gives it, supply on chain, Christie’s figure, and 2017 contract address. The disagreements are the point.
  • Sources — built. Split into primary chain, primary 2017 documents, the standard, project sources, journalism, and your own archive.
  • Open Questions — built, in the quote bank. Fifteen things that could not be established, so nobody has to guess twice.
  • Where the record and the memory diverge — built, in the quote bank. Fourteen numbered contradictions, C1–C14, each presented as a contradiction.

The four decisions, taken in your absence

You hadn’t answered these and the book wasn’t going to improve by waiting. Each was decided, written that way throughout, and is cheap to reverse — the reversal cost is stated so you can price it before arguing.

1. Title — footnote. A Little Footnote in the Code. It is your own line, from the Bitcoin Talk Show on 24 July 2018, and it earns itself twice: you meant it as modest pride, and the research found that the footnote says Curio Cards are not the thing being standardised. The title is doing the book’s argument. Dying on the Vine — also yours, 20 July 2017 — went to chapter 8, where it belongs. Reversal cost: trivial. Two strings in build.py.

2. Person — third. You are the main witness and the book talks about you as “Hunt”. The reason is method, not distance. This book’s whole approach is setting your testimony beside the record and showing where they diverge — fourteen numbered times. In the first person that becomes either self-flagellation (“I got the supply wrong three times”) or incoherence, and the four source-types in the note on sources stop being distinguishable: “Hunt said X in June 2017” has to read differently from the connective tissue, and in first person it cannot. Third person also lets the book quote you more, and in your own words at the time, which is the best material in it. Reversal cost: high. A full rewrite of all fifteen chapters. If you want first person, say so before anything else gets done.

3. Chapter 5 — chapter, with the catalogue in the apparatus. Thirty cards as a catalogue would have been a list nobody reads. As a chapter it carries the founding promise and the evidence it was kept, the Google-form selection criterion, the Marisol Vengas correction, card 26 as the accidental bottleneck, and the eclipse card that went up two days late. The full table is now apparatus/THE-CARDS.md, generated programmatically from the quote bank so it can’t drift. Reversal cost: low. The catalogue already exists as its own page.

4. The claim — not defended. Chapter 14 opens by saying it does not defend the claim and doesn’t. It gives the chain in order, shows that “six weeks before CryptoPunks” silently measures to the June 22 relaunch rather than the June 9 V1 deployment (one month, not six weeks), names PixelMap, 17 November 2016 as the gap nobody on any side has reasoned through, shows Etheria making the same retrospective move Curio’s claim depends on, and shows Larva Labs quietly softening “the first” to “one of the earliest” in 2021. It ends on a formulation the evidence does support, explicitly labelled as the book’s own words and not a quotation.

This is less flattering than the press has been and more defensible than anything published. Your own 2021 line — “if there’s one earlier than Curio cards and it’s in the blockchain, I’m not going to fight it” — is quoted at the top of the chapter as the licence for proceeding this way. Reversal cost: moderate, and not recommended. The documented record does not support a confident claim, and a confident claim is the one thing in this book that someone could disprove.

What this draft still wants

Honest list, so nobody mistakes a complete draft for a finished book.

  1. A read-through for repetition. The chapters were written in sequence against a shared quote bank, and a few quotes and arguments recur across chapters by design — the version numbers, the four-year gap, the 2017 price. Some of that is deliberate callback and some is redundancy, and only a continuous read will tell them apart.
  2. The counts in Part 10 settled. Several are one call away: balanceOf(lockedWrapper) on card 26 settles the locked-card figure; a Pushshift or Arctic-Shift dump settles whether a 2017 Reddit post exists; the California Secretary of State settles the entity.
  3. The four pivotal tweets read. @DieAping’s find, Harry BTC’s tutorial, McBride’s thread, Gerring’s self-identification. Dated and documented; contents unread, and so unquoted.
  4. Robert Alice, On NFTs, pp. 46–47. Wikipedia’s only book citation and probably the most citable print source on the subject. Not obtained.
  5. An artist read. Robek, Daniel Friedman, Max Infeld and Luis Buenaventura are quoted throughout from their own recordings. Letting them see their own chapters before anything is published is the right thing to do and would probably also fix two or three facts.
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