Appendix A — How to Verify, in Ten Minutes

This book has invited verification on nearly every page. This appendix teaches it. No account is needed, nothing is signed, and nothing costs anything: reading the chain is free and permissionless, which is the point of the chain.

Step 1 — Open a block explorer. A block explorer is a public website that reads the ledger and presents it legibly: every address, contract, and transaction, searchable by anyone. Choose any well-established explorer for the Ethereum network. (https://Etherscan.io)

Step 2 — Look up a transaction. Paste a transaction hash — the long string beginning 0x — into the search field. The explorer returns the permanent record: the address that signed it (from), the contract it touched (to or contract created), and the block timestamp. This is the record this book calls the origin-event.

Step 3 — Read a minting transaction. For a mint, note three things: the signing address (whose act was this?), the timestamp (when?), and the token created (what?). These are the who, when, what of Chapter Six.

Step 4 — Check who deployed the contract. Open the contract's address page and find its creation transaction. The address that deployed it answers the first Collector's Question: artist's hand, or platform's infrastructure?

Step 5 — Confirm the name. If the artist uses an ENS name, check that it resolves to the address in question — and check the reverse record too, confirming the address points back to the name. A name pointing at an address is a claim; an address pointing back at the name is the address's own confirmation of it. Then check the human layer: has the artist publicly and consistently claimed this address, over time, in the open record?

Step 6 — Walk the custody. From the mint forward, read the token's transfer history: each holder, each date, in sequence. This is the back of the envelope.

A worked example. Take The Curse of the Artist Hand (later known as The One), which has been mentioned repeatedly. In the search field of any explorer, enter the minting transaction: 0x04b85ea353ea40454262365de0e098c504c5a11d6a95d82fd9b73c6e9ea45cbd. Confirm that the signing address is the one this book calls "2d0" (0x7f7a01103cdd4be0e594c1e78d2dbd2cf13362d0), that the contract is 0xD06555b974c9103FDb0229625B1fb28fA5a10D6b, and that the block timestamp reads January 18, 2018, 02:30:15 UTC. You have now verified the origin without trusting its author. That took about ten minutes the first time.

What verification cannot tell you. The explorer proves the key, not the person (Chapter Six); the mint, not the making (Chapter Six, "The Stolen Mint"); the event, not its honesty (Chapter Nine, "The Ledger Keeps Lies, Too"). The ten minutes above establish the skeleton of fact. The judgment of what the facts mean is, as it has always been, yours.