A public claim register by Semiel: anyone can write a message onchain and it is kept with their address and the block it arrived in.
Historical Significance
A contract whose entire purpose is to let people write something down and be recorded doing it. Nothing moves, nothing is enforced and nothing can be revoked; the only property it offers is that the record outlives the person who made it and the service that carried it. It was written to be used by strangers rather than by its author, which was uncommon for contracts of its period.
Context
Ethereum's Frontier network went live on 30 July 2015. The chain carried almost no applications in its first months: what was deployed was mostly tutorial code, token experiments and registries, written in a Solidity that was itself only a few months old and compiled from the geth console.
Key Facts
Description
TerraNullius keeps a single growing array of claims. Calling claim() with a string appends a record holding the sender's address, the message and the block number it was made in. number_of_claims() reports how many have been made, and the public claims array lets any of them be read back by index.
There is no owner, no fee, no length limit and no way to edit or remove a claim once made. The name is the legal term for territory belonging to nobody, and the contract treats a young chain that way: a place where anyone may stake a sentence and have the stake recorded.
Semiel deployed several copies of it in a single day.
Heuristic Analysis
The following characteristics were detected through bytecode analysis and may not be accurate.
Frontier Era
The initial release of Ethereum. A bare-bones implementation for technical users.
Bytecode Overview
Verified Source Available
This contract has verified source code on Etherscan.
Show source code (Solidity)
// Submitted by EthereumHistory (ethereumhistory.com)
contract TerraNullius {
struct Claim { address claimant; string message; uint block_number; }
Claim[] public claims;
function claim(string message) {
uint index = claims.length;
claims.length++;
claims[index] = Claim(msg.sender, message, block.number);
}
function number_of_claims() returns(uint result) {
return claims.length;
}
}External Links
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