Ethereum addresses are the next hot commodity!

Addresses can be desirable either because they have nice vanity name (like `0xC0FF33…`) or because they have a large number of zeroes (so that calls to them are slightly cheaper than to a random address[1]).

A nice short prefix like `0xC0FF33` can be generated on an M1 MacBook in about a day, but what if you want a more complex address that you don't have the computational resources for[2]? You can outsource this to an address miner — but then they would know the private key, which could be a problem if you want to store high-value stuff on it.

So instead, you ask a miner to find the desirable address through the contract deployment procedure (which doesn't reveal a private key), then deploy a mutable proxy contract to that address and hand the control over to you.

What if you don't know an address miner or don't want the headache of figuring out which proxy contract to pick? 1inch proposes to turn it into a free market with this "NFT owns an address" implementation: https://github.com/1inch/address-token. This way, address miners can mine nice addresses, deploy a standard proxy contract whose ownership is represented by an NFT — and then just sell the NFT on any NFT marketplace.

How cool is that?

[1]: https://medium.com/coinmonks/on-efficient-ethereum-addresses-3fef0596e263

[2]: I tried getting `0xC0FF3DA4`, but that proved too difficult to find on a local machine. The complexity grows roughly exponentially with the number of characters!