5/9 reward checks: NFTs awarded by me for finding typos/bugs or making suggestions to my public work Inspired by Donald Knuth's reward checks :)

~2 years ago, I learned about Knuth's reward checks They're checks awarded by Knuth to people who find errors or make substantial suggestions on his published work, typically worth a "hexadecimal dollar" (denoted 0x$1.00), or $2.56:

I love stuff like this because it speaks to Knuth's perfectionism and wit, and it's also just a really fun, unique idea Feels like a representation of his values and sense of humor that you can also feel when reading his work, like Digital Typography:

They were real, negotiable checks until 2008, when he was forced to stop due to issues w/ check fraud, and he's since replaced it w/ a fictional "Bank of San Serriffe" w/ fake money

As "someone in crypto," I thought it was super ironic that 1 of the greatest computer scientists ever manually maintains a comically large HTML page, when it's trivially solved by blockchains:

Since basically all of my work is public, and I like creating fully on-chain things, I wanted to make my own version as NFTs that I mint to people, alongside 5.5̅ ⋅ 10⁻⁵ ETH Obviously, mine wouldn't require fictional banks or pretend money :)

1 day, I got hit w/ some inspiration and came up w/ a rotated 3×3 grid w/ 5/9 of the squares filled out as the central element: (read the blog post for more details if you're curious)

Apart from the obvious reference to 5/9 (me) w/ the highlighted pixels, I fit in a couple more:

I wanted to reference 5/9 not just because I love myself but also to make my reward checks fun and representative of me, just like how Knuth is playful w/ his (apart from the core idea of being a fully on-chain NFT, I've referenced 555 and 5/9 many times in past work)

I thought the design looked pretty cool but a little too ambiguous, so I reused the design/code I created for @curta_ctf Flags to display some relevant information:

To submit a fix/suggestion, make a PR on any of my repos or DM me on 𝕏 or Farcaster If you want a 5/9 reward check, let me know your Ethereum address :)