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Ask HN: Did you buy Etheria tiles in 2015? You are likely rich

37 points by fivedogit ↗ HN
(Note: I emailed dang about this first, and he suggested an Ask HN. For openness and simplicity, I'll simply paste that email here with an additional note below.)

Hi. I hope this email still reaches Dan.

I'm trying to reach a user that went by the handle "makaronin" in 2015-2018 on Hacker News (and elsewhere around the web).

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=makaronin

This user bought several tiles in Etheria (the first NFT project on Ethereum) which are now worth several million USD, but I can't reach them bc I don't have their email address and they've deleted their Reddit account.

You can see that they purchased the tiles here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/3qecog/comment/cw...

I don't need their email directly. A simple email from you, to them, saying "Hi. Did you buy Etheria tiles in 2015? You might want to look into that, if so. If not, please disregard" would suffice. etheria.world is the official site.

I'd love for this person to find out they're worth millions (if they weren't already). Can you assist?

Cyrus

p.s. Further evidence (linux knowledge, forum postings, etc): https://forums.lenovo.com/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/10291...

-------------

ADDITIONAL NOTE: There are several other "cold" accounts that have Etheria tiles, including a tile containing the first tradable UGC artwork ever put on any blockchain (the cabin on tile 16,5). Additionally these early buyers tended to buy "rare" tiles (islands, ice, mountains, etc) that are possibly worth 10x "normal/floor" tiles.

To see the cold tiles and accounts, go to https://etheria.world/exchange.html and click "recency".

My email is cyrus at the official domain above.

9 comments

[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 26.7 ms ] thread
atdrummond
Sadly I can’t figure out how to access my old etheria tiles…
FDSGSG
Very cool of you to do this.
TekMol
I am trying to understand what this is about.

As I understand it, this is a virtual world that you can see at https://etheria.world and tiles of the area of that world are traded via NFTs on Ethereum?

The website has an Alexa rank of over 1 million. So it is barely used. How can tiles in this world be worth millions of Dollars then?

PragmaticPulp
It's extremely unlikely that there is a hot market for Etheria tiles where eager buyers are waiting for more tiles to come on the market so they can pay people hundreds of thousands of dollars.

What's likely happening is standard NFT hype: Someone realized that Etheria tiles have a good story (one of the first NFTs) and they're also artificially scarce (because most original users forgot or lost them), so they make for good "NFT sells for $xxx,xxx headlines".

Anyone with an NFT can "sell" it to themselves in a wash trade between two wallets they control, meaning they don't actually spend any money. However, the transaction is recorded online so they can now say their NFT is "worth" the transaction price.

The next step is to flip the NFT to someone else who can be fooled into thinking that it's actually worth that amount due to some organic demand. Be skeptical of every headline about some obscure NFT trading for hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's trivially easy for someone with a lot of crypto to manufacture fake sales and pump up the prices.

notwedtm
I appreciate that you included the email to dang, but I still can't shake the feeling that this is an ad.
Traster
I thought the same thing too, but then I realised the guy that is posting this is the same person that replied to Makaronin on the forum 5 years ago, so probably has genuinely drunk the cool-aid (there's no way these NFTs are worthy anyhting but pump and dump), but it's atleast being done in atleast somewhat good faith.
dropnerd
are picassos a pump and dump?

are some paintings that never became famous a pump and dump?

how did you decide that etheria is a pump and dump?

Jugurtha
Related: someone I know recently logged to their Coinbase account and found out that the amount they had bought a few years ago has disappeared and it left a bad taste in their mouth.

Is anyone familiar with this situation?

jareklupinski
If I suddenly had several million dollars lying around, I would also make myself as difficult to contact as possible.

It is likely they know ;) don't worry abt it