On-chain obituary for Mark H. Kane (1950 to 2015) of Richmond, deployed by his family in March 2018. 5 getters expose title, name, dates, body, poem.
Historical Significance
One of the earliest and most poignant on-chain memorials on Ethereum. The contract is part of a small genre of personal-record deployments from the 2018 era: contracts whose authors used Ethereum's permanent state to preserve birthdays, marriages, love letters, and deaths, with no financial motivation. As an example of Ethereum being used as the world's most durable public memorial, it predates the 2021 to 2022 wave of on-chain personal-data NFTs and represents a quiet, family-scale use of the chain that the early Ethereum community sometimes envisioned but rarely publicized. The five-getter design rather than one bundled string shows an author who modeled the structure of a printed obituary (title, name, dates, body, poem) directly into the contract ABI.
Context
Deployed 26 March 2018, during the slow grind down from the late-2017 ETH peak. Solidity was at v0.4.x and contract storage was effectively free at the time.
Key Facts
Description
A contract whose only purpose is to preserve an obituary on Ethereum. Five no-argument getters return the title, name, dates, biographical text, and a closing poem, each as a Solidity string constant baked into the runtime. The fields are split across separate selectors rather than returned as one large string.
Selector map: 0x422c4b05 returns 'In Loving Memory'; 0x17d7de7c returns 'Mark H. Kane'; 0x16441813 returns 'October 24, 1950 - August 19, 2015'; 0xe28a18f7 returns the obituary body; 0x951bdcde returns the closing poem.
Obituary body: Mark Kane, a longtime Richmond resident, died suddenly surrounded by his loving family. A salesman for Leos Professional Audio for over 25 years, he was a lyrical songwriter and musician. Mark is survived by his wife of 10 years, Jinky and his daughter, Crystal. He leaves his sister, Mary Marshall, a nephew, Evan Marshall and two nieces, Christina Grappo and Kathryn Marshall. Mark was a devoted husband, father, brother, uncle, neighbor and friend.
Closing poem: 'Don't grieve for me, for now I'm free / I took His hand when I heard him call / I turned my back and left it all / Then fill it with remembered joy / My life's been full, I savored much / Good friends, good times, a loved one's touch / A friendship shared, a laugh, a kiss / Ah yes, these, I too, will miss / Perhaps my time seemed all too brief / Don't lengthen it now with undue grief / Lift up your hearts and share with me / God wanted me now, He set me free.' The poem is a known funerary text often titled 'He Is Gone' or 'Don't Grieve For Me, For Now I'm Free' (sometimes attributed to Colleen Hitchcock).
Deployed 26 March 2018 at block 5,326,011 by 0xb41e8394488e471f8e8f5c73711d0de415582d13, two and a half years after Mark Kane's death on 19 August 2015. The contract has no functions beyond the five text getters, no balance, and no economics. The family used Ethereum as a permanent gravestone.
Source Verified
All five getters are recoverable via eth_call; the underlying strings are constant byte arrays in the runtime bytecode immediately preceding the trailing CBOR metadata. Decoded text is documented in the proof folder. No source code was published by the deployer; the runtime is a pure constant-return Solidity contract.
Heuristic Analysis
The following characteristics were detected through bytecode analysis and may not be accurate.
Byzantium Era
First Metropolis hard fork. Added zk-SNARK precompiles, REVERT opcode, and staticcall.