I reverse-engineered the source code of GavCoin (2016) and got an exact bytecode match - now trying to get Etherscan to verify it

GavCoin (0xb4abc1bfc403a7b82c777420c81269858a4b8aa4) was deployed on April 26, 2016 - one of the earliest token contracts on Ethereum. The original source used #require directives from the Mix IDE preprocessor, which hasn't existed for years. The code was never verified on Etherscan.

I spent a while reconstructing the source from bytecode analysis:

• Brute-forced all 12 function selectors via keccak256 to recover the exact function names (turns out Gav used changeOwner not setOwner, nameRegAddress not name)
• Discovered the contract has zero events, no inheritance, and a flat storage layout - unusual for something based on dapp-bin's coin.sol
• Found that function declaration order matters in solc 0.3.x because it controls where the shared return trampoline gets placed in bytecode
• The constructor registers itself as "GavCoin" in the old global NameReg contract and mints 1,000,000 tokens to the deployer, plus has a proof-of-work mining function anyone could call

End result: exact byte-for-byte match of the 905-byte runtime bytecode across solc v0.1.6 through v0.3.2 with optimizer enabled.

Source and one-command verification script: https://github.com/cartoonitunes/gavcoin-verify

The problem: Etherscan's verification form only supports solc v0.4.11 and newer. GavCoin was compiled with v0.3.1. So I've emailed them requesting manual verification.

I also submitted verification requests for two other historic contracts from the same era - Alex Van de Sande's Unicorn Meat system (the MeatConversionCalculator and MeatGrindersAssociation). The Grinder Association is one of the earliest DAOs on Ethereum, featuring quadratic voting and on-chain proposals. Source for those is in avsa's original gist.

These early contracts are fascinating. Pre-ERC-20, pre-EIP, people were just experimenting. Proof-of-work token mining, on-chain name registries, quadratic voting DAOs - all in 2016.

If anyone has other unverified historic contracts they'd like help with, happy to share the approach.