BITCOIN PUZZLE SOLVED AFTER 3 YEARS
HIDDEN BITCOIN
Artist Marguerite deCourcelle, also known as coin artist, has been hiding Bitcoin in digital paintings for years. Her third Bitcoin puzzle, released in April 2015, has finally been solved by a 30-year old programmer. Obviously we don’t know very much about this little smarty pants, but we do know he’s now the proud owner of around $50K worth of Bitcoin.
The Bitcoin puzzle The Legend of Satoshi Nakamoto (1FLAMEN6), has been a work in puzzle solving progress for ages! It took nearly 1095 days for the third puzzle in the series, “TORCHED H34R7S”, to be solved. When deCourcelle and fellow artist Rob Myers originally placed the key to the Bitcoin wallet into the digital painting, the wallet contained 4.87 Bitcoins — which was, at the time, worth about $1,400.
The painting was inspired by William Shakespeare’s poem, The Phoenix and the Turtle, and contains two coded pieces of information. Decoding and combining these would yield the private key to the Bitcoin wallet containing the coins.
Oh and the plot thickens because the poem itself is something of a mystery and has been the subject of rampant speculation about who Shakespeare was actually referring to when he spoke of the Turtle and the Phoenix. A turtledove and a phoenix feature pretty pretty pretty prominently in deCourcelle’s painting. Just sayin’… ;-)
So how the puzzle actually worked
The puzzle encoded a string of binary — a series of zeroes and ones — in complicated rows of flames painted around the edge of the canvas.
The colour and shape of each flame determined a four-character chunk of the binary series, with a further part of the code represented by six ribbons of different lengths in the bottom right-hand corner.
After all of these codes had been worked out and linked together, the 30-year old programmer was able to translate the full string of zeroes and ones into a Bitcoin private key with the help of a simple computer program. JUST WOW!
Get a super geeky mega detailed explanation of the little smarty pants solution right here.
SOURCES: BBC, Bitcoinist & Motherboard
Originally published at VISIONAIRE.
