A playful on-chain voting contract where users bid ETH to rank the best sci-fi movies of all time — one of the first interactive dApps on Ethereum Frontier.
Historical Significance
One of the first interactive consumer dApps deployed on Ethereum mainnet, demonstrating creative use of market-based voting mechanisms just 10 days after the Frontier launch. Featured by ether.camp explorer as an example contract.
Context
Ethereum Frontier had launched on July 30, 2015 — a command-line-only release targeted at developers. There were no wallets, no block explorers (ether.camp was just launching), and interacting with contracts required pasting JavaScript into a geth console. Gas costs were minimal and ETH was nearly worthless, enabling playful experimentation.
Key Facts
Description
Deployed on August 8, 2015 — just 10 days after Ethereum's Frontier launch — the SciFi contract was a lighthearted experiment in on-chain market-based voting created by Reddit user drcode. Users could bid ETH on their favorite science fiction movies, and the contract maintained a ranked list of the top 20 films based on total bids. All ETH sent to the contract was permanently burned: drcode deliberately included no withdrawal function, ensuring the creator couldn't manipulate the rankings by voting for free.
The contract was announced on r/ethereum by drcode with the tongue-in-cheek declaration: "I HEREBY DECLARE THAT THIS CONTRACT WILL FOR ALL TIME BE THE ONLY OFFICIAL LIST OF THE BEST SCIENCE FICTION MOVIES FOR ALL PEOPLE ON PLANET EARTH FOR THE NEXT 1000 YEARS." The initial rankings, seeded by drcode, placed eXistenZ at #1 with 0.0045 ETH, followed by Blade Runner and Melancholia.
The Solidity source code was published directly in the Reddit post — a simple contract with a vote function that accepted a movie name (as bytes32) and a bid amount. If the movie was new, it was added to the list; otherwise the bid accumulated. Users interacted by pasting JavaScript directly into their geth console, reflecting the raw, command-line nature of early Ethereum usage before wallets like MetaMask existed.
The SciFi contract represents one of the earliest known interactive consumer dApps on Ethereum — a creative proof-of-concept that used market mechanisms (ETH staking) to solve a "real" problem (ranking movies). It also appeared in Roman Mandeleil's ether.camp explorer launch announcement (where drcode commented about the vmtrace feature) as one of the featured example contracts, demonstrating that the Frontier community was already experimenting with novel use cases within days of launch.
Source Verified
One of the first dApps on Ethereum, deployed 9 days after Frontier launch. Users bid ETH to rank sci-fi movies. Compiled with solc v0.1.4, optimizer enabled. 219 bytes runtime.
Historian Categories
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
Source verified through compiler archaeology and exact bytecode matching.
View Verification ProofShow source code (Solidity)
contract SciFi {
mapping(bytes32 => uint) public bids;
bytes32[1000000000] public movies;
uint public movie_num;
function vote(bytes32 name) {
if (msg.value==0)
return;
uint val=bids[name];
if (val==0) {
movies[movie_num++]=name;
}
bids[name]+=msg.value;
}
}