Show HN: The Million Dollar Homepage as an Ethereum Smart Contract and DApp

Author here. My friend and I have been doing some smart contract audits, and we wanted to build a fun contract ourselves. We remembered the Million Dollar Homepage from 12 years ago, and decided to reimagine what it would look like today _on the blockchain_.

Not an ICO, more of an experiment / art project.

We present, the Thousand Ether Homepage: https://thousandetherhomepage.com/

The smart contract itself: https://etherscan.io/address/0xb5fe93ccfec708145d6278b0c71ce...

What’s cool about it:

- It’s immortalized on the Ethereum blockchain. As long Ethereum is around, your ad slot will be yours to do with it what you please. No need to rely on us to run the service indefinitely.

- There’s no email signups, no passwords, no credit cards.

- You buy ads by calling a method on the smart contract with the correct Ether value, and tada. All done from an Ethereum-enabled browser (like the MetaMask extension or Mist/Parity.

- Once you buy an ad, the DApp _knows_ who you are from the wallet integration and you can edit it without logging in explicitly.

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All the code is open source, so check out the nitty gritties: https://github.com/thousandetherhomepage/

I would love to start an art project that can buy me an Aston Martin :)

I love this idea! I actually just finished creating a video course that teaches you how to build a similar thing: https://www.newline.co/courses/million-ether-homepage/

In our version you're able to bid for each pixel -- if the previous owner is outbid, the funds are returned. Sending funds in Solidity from a contract is really tricky to handle because there are so many ways it can go wrong.

For example, when you send funds to an address, it can purposefully reject your payment and even call back into your own functions. This is like if when you called a REST API, the API was potentially malicious and could call any public function in your code (!).

This is a really fun project and it's cool to see how you can connect web-apps to the Ethereum network.

Thanks for building this! I was wondering about this a few months ago, glad it’s finally here. This is such a good example. https://twitter.com/johncoogan/status/890780575480430593