Million Ether Homepage

[00:00 - 00:06] In 2005, in Wilshire, England, there was a young student who was about to start school at the University of Nottingham. The student's name was Alex II.

[00:07 - 00:16] Alex didn't have a lot of cash, and so, like a lot of students, he was going to take out student loans to pay for his education. But the high costs trouble then, so he sat and brainstormed a few ideas, and something struck him.

[00:17 - 00:30] "Like, it was about midnight, and I was brainstorming away. I just thought, 'Well, I'll sell a million pixels for a dollar each.'" Alex's idea was to build a website with a 1000x1000 image grid and sell each pixel for a dollar each. If he sold the whole image, he'd end up with a million dollars.

[00:31 - 00:38] "Well, the minute that I homepage was something that I created because I was broke." He told all his friends and family and managed to raise about a thousand dollars.

[00:39 - 00:49] Then he used that money to issue a press release to drive even more attention to the site. "The first thing that I did, I told all my friends and family, right, I'm lucky that press release got picked up by the BBC and some newspapers in the UK.

[00:50 - 00:56] And on the day those articles went out, the site made like $2,000. And then the next day it made like $2,000, and then it made $3,000.

[00:57 - 01:00] And once the ball was rolling, it was like there was no stopping it. It was like the snowball effect.

[01:01 - 01:12] "In four and a half months, the page had sold out." "There was a day, like there was one day, it was near as eve. And the site went ballistic and there was like 20,000 people logging on every hour.

[01:13 - 01:17] And the money was just flowing in at a rate of about $100,000 an hour." But it wasn't all rosy.

[01:18 - 01:26] During the auction of the final pixels, there was an extortion attempt where a group demanded $50,000 for they would take down the site. Alex didn't pay and they initiated a DDOS.

[01:27 - 01:30] And they brought down the site for a whole week. The attack eventually subsided.

[01:31 - 01:34] Alex sold his final pixels. And the million dollar home page is still with us today.

[01:35 - 01:45] In this course, we're going to build a version of the million dollar home page as a decentralized app on the Ethereum blockchain. Alex used PayPal to process his payments, but we're going to accept our payments through Ethereum.

[01:46 - 01:52] Alex's site was brought down by attackers. But our pixels will live on the Ethereum blockchain and no attackers can bring them down.

[01:53 - 01:59] Alex put his pixels up for auction on eBay. But we're going to auction our pixels directly in Ethereum with a smart contract.

[02:00 - 02:04] I want to be clear here. I am not trying to get you to build a copycat site and I'm not trying to teach you how to get rich.

[02:05 - 02:21] Instead, the million dollar home page is a perfect introductory decentralized app because it touches on many of the ideas that we can bring into other DMs. For example, in building this app, we'll talk about how to build a user interface using HTML and JavaScript in the browser that connects to code on the Ethereum blockchain.

[02:22 - 02:27] How to write smart contracts that control their own funds. How to auction scarce digital goods in smart contracts.

[02:28 - 02:42] We'll also talk about patterns for robust solidity code. How to track real-time events on the Ethereum blockchain and push them to our browser using web sockets and security considerations for writing smart contracts so that you don't have your funds stolen.

[02:43 - 02:51] This course is forgetting started with Ethereum and Solidity programming. We walk through every step on how to build a million-eather home page from empty folder to the blockchain.

[02:52 - 03:01] If you want to learn the practical steps to building the full stack Ethereum D Ms, then this course is for you. Let's get started by looking at how we store pixels on the blockchain.

[03:02 - 03:17] It's a bit crazy and the internet is the perfect place for crazy ideas. Bye!

[03:18 - 03:22] (upbeat music) (upbeat music)