FunDistributor

Deployed on August 10, 2015, the FunDistributor contract was a fascinating early experiment in on-chain game theory and behavioral economics. The creator described it as "a contract for exploring behavioral economics and human psychology" — and the mechanics were elegantly simple.

Anyone could call the touch function and send more than 1% of the contract's current balance to become the "king of the hill" (the receiver). If no one else called touch for 200 consecutive blocks (roughly 50 minutes at Frontier block times), the current king would receive 25% of the contract's entire balance. This created an escalating game of chicken: each new challenger added to the pot while resetting the countdown, meaning the pot grew larger but the competition intensified.

The post on r/ethereum received 16 upvotes and generated genuine interest, with community members experimenting with the contract through the geth console. The creator had to edit the post to explain that some users were sending ETH directly to the contract address instead of calling the touch function — a common early-Ethereum usability issue that would persist until better wallet interfaces emerged.

This contract is a precursor to the "King of the Ether Throne" and similar last-player-wins games that would become a recognizable genre in Ethereum's first year. It demonstrated that even with Frontier's bare-bones tooling, developers were already designing sophisticated incentive mechanisms and exploring how economic game theory played out on an immutable, trustless platform.