Ethereum Etheria v0.9

Information

Created: 19 October 2015
Creator: Cyrus Adkisson
Blockchain: Ethereum

Description

The World Before the World

An island without an owner

Imagine buying a piece of land in a world where nobody can take it away from you, not even the person who created the world. There is no company running the servers, no administrator who can change the rules and no customer-support department to appeal to when something goes wrong. The world exists on a blockchain, and its rules are written into software.

In 2015, this was still an unusual idea. Ethereum had gone live on July 30, and developers were only beginning to discover what they could do with it. The network could run programs that held money, recorded ownership and executed transactions without relying on a central operator. What it lacked was an established set of conventions for building applications around those capabilities.

Cyrus Adkisson, who wrote online under the name fivedogit, decided to try building a virtual world. He called it Etheria.

His idea was an island divided into hexagonal tiles. Players could buy land, gather building materials and stack blocks to construct things. The map, ownership records and building data would live on Ethereum rather than on a separate game server. There would be no company behind the world and no switch that could simply turn it off.

Adkisson had a more serious concern behind the experiment. He believed virtual worlds would eventually become so compelling that people might spend much of their lives inside them. If one world attracted enough users to dominate the market, whoever controlled it could learn an extraordinary amount about its inhabitants. That company would have the power to observe its users, decide the rules and exclude anyone it wished.

A world that nobody controlled was his alternative. In his 2015 writing, he made the point that it should be beyond the reach of governments, its players and even himself.

He had not entirely worked out what people would do once they arrived. One idea involved marauding barbarians attacking poorly defended property. The difficulty was teaching the Ethereum Virtual Machine to judge whether a tile was properly fortified. A voting system might help, but players could manipulate it by creating several accounts. Adkisson eventually abandoned the idea of a more elaborate game. Players would build things because they wanted to build things. There did not need to be another objective.

It was a straightforward answer to a question that would trouble virtual-world designers for years: what makes a world worth inhabiting when nobody has given you a reason to be there?

The contracts that didn't make it

Etheria did not arrive fully formed. Before v0.9, Adkisson deployed several contracts that attempted to solve different parts of the problem. The failures remain recorded on Ethereum, where they can still be examined.

Researcher goatishduck investigated these early contracts and found traces of the development process: unfinished code, attempts to define the map's boundaries and trading mechanisms that were not yet safe to use. Adkisson later acknowledged that the versions preceding v0.9 were either vulnerable to being destroyed or contained serious trading flaws. He was experimenting, and the blockchain kept the receipts.

One particularly interesting failure was Etheria v0.6, deployed on September 30, 2015. According to the technical account supplied with this research, a one-character programming mistake prevented tiles from changing ownership. A comparison operation had been used where an assignment was required. The contract could describe a world, but its property could not properly change hands.

Other drafts reportedly failed in the opposite direction. In v0.7, v0.8 and v0.85, missing ownership checks left the trading system open to abuse. A player could potentially take another person's tile by exploiting the offer mechanism. The v0.85 version was also said to contain a copy-and-paste error in its makeOffer function, allowing a payment of 1 ETH to seize a tile regardless of who owned it.

The detailed descriptions of these bugs come from the research notes accompanying this story, which attribute them to Adkisson's later explanation and an X thread by the researcher @0xzxch. The original thread and presentation could not be independently inspected for this account, so the precise mechanics should be treated as reported findings rather than fully verified facts.

The pattern is clear enough. Each failed version was another attempt to solve the same problem: how do you create a persistent digital world in which people can own property without having to trust the person who built it?

The answers were not always reassuring. In one version, property could not change hands. In others, it could change hands far too easily.

Contract number 2,432

On October 19, 2015, Etheria v0.9 went live. Ethereum recorded it as contract number 2,432. The contract was compiled with Solidity 0.1.6, when ether was worth roughly 43 US cents and the tools for writing smart contracts were still primitive.

The map contained 1,089 hexagonal tiles arranged in a 33-by-33 grid. Each tile had an elevation, with the elevation data held partly in a separate helper contract. Tiles at elevation 125 or above counted as land, leaving 457 parcels available to own. The other 632 tiles were ocean. Every later version of Etheria would use the same map.

An unclaimed land tile cost 1 ETH, paid to the creator. Owners could put their property up for sale by making an offer, and accepting an offer sent 90 per cent of the payment to the seller and 10 per cent to the creator. This was a property market written into a smart contract, years before NFT marketplaces became commonplace.

The arrangement had some awkward features. There was no simple function for transferring a tile from one address to another. If you wanted to move your property to a different wallet, you had to make an offer and accept it yourself. Worse, someone could fill all nine available offer slots on a tile, potentially preventing its owner from completing a transfer. A world without a central administrator could still have troublesome neighbours.

Then there was the building system. Players could farm a tile once every 4,320 Ethereum blocks, receiving ten randomly selected blocks from a collection of 32 types. They could position and stack those blocks to construct objects, provided they obeyed the rules of the virtual physics. Blocks could not overlap, and each had to rest on the ground or on other blocks. The idea was rather like LEGO, except that the instructions were enforced by software and every mistake cost gas.

Gas is the fee paid to execute computations on Ethereum. Etheria's building contract checked its entire list of occupied positions whenever a block was placed. As structures grew, those checks became more expensive. Eventually, a building transaction could run into the network's gas limit, preventing the owner from making further changes.

The results were modest. According to goatishduck's examination of the contract, just eleven tiles were purchased in 2015. One tile, at column 4, row 5, was farmed once and contained the only structure built that year. No tiles had been named, and the first accepted offer would not occur until 2021.

By ordinary measures, this was not a successful game launch. Almost nobody played, and there was little reason for anyone to return. But the absence of an audience did not mean the experiment had failed in every respect.

Etheria had a finite collection of individually ownable digital objects, a mechanism for distributing them and rules governing how ownership could change. Its world state was recorded directly on Ethereum rather than in a company's private database. The ERC-721 standard, now commonly associated with NFTs, did not yet exist.

There is a qualification to the claim that Etheria was the first NFT project. It depends partly on how an NFT is defined, and digital collectibles had a history before Ethereum. Etheria's own FAQ argues that its design meets the familiar criteria for an NFT project unusually clearly. Researchers have also cautioned that the blockchain alone cannot establish every detail of the historical account, including the creator's identity and the circumstances of deployment.

Adkisson himself did not regard v0.9 as the official beginning. He considered the next version the first release, which explains the numbering. Only years later, while examining the old contracts and transactions, did the earlier version receive the attention it deserved.

The first world was already there. It would take a later generation of collectors and researchers to work out what it meant.