Blockstream Satellite broadcasted a message from an anonymous user. It was cryptic and rambling. It was a challenge to the Bitcoin community to join the hunt for a million dollars (198 BTC approximately) which he called “Satoshi’s Treasure.” With no fear of grandiloquence this user said that the contest would “test the resolve, courage, intelligence, and savvy [sic] of would-be hunters,”
“This message should reach you at the middle of the fourth month of your calendar year, in the year 2019,” the message said. “If you are reading this, something has led you to search for things which bring excitement to an otherwise predictable world.”
The message continues saying that clues will be provided to find the reward through the website satoshitreasure.xyz. He also said that the first three keys will b published in the next few days, and he got the ball rolling himself. “What you are reading is the first clue in a grand Hunt,” according to the message.
“It is not the first Hunt, nor of course will it be the last one, but the hunt is MINE, and so it is to me that you must prove yourself.”
The message kind of publishes the ground rules albeit in a somewhat confused and enigmatic way. It describes the final prize as “neither gold, nor jewels, nor the pieces of worthless paper that pass for money in this sad age,” it insists, will go to “the most successful Hunters and their clan.”
The game master claims to have broken the million dollars “bitcoinucopia” into a thousand pieces. He achieved that using the “splitting magic of the wizard Shamir.” The contest consists in finding 400 out of those thousand pieces and cast Shamir’s “spell of recombination” to rebuild the artifact and claim the prize.
“Once you have done so, the treasure will be irrevocably yours,” the message proclaimed.
The Shamir reference is itself quite ambiguous. It could mean a character from the role-playing game “Magic: The Gathering or Dungeons & Dragons” or a well-known Israeli cryptographer Adi Shamir.
The world would have already found out what the first three keys were starting from April 16th to April 18th at noon in three selected geographic coordinates.
Satoshi’s Treasure fits into a tradition of games and puzzles in which anonymous enthusiasts embed little bits and pieces of data about a Bitcoin private key in all kinds of things such as art, pictures, and other forms of media.
The last episode happened in France where USD 1.000,00 in Bitcoin was hiding inside a replica of the famous picture “Liberty Leading the Republic.”
The most important event of this kind was probably the one known as “The Legend of Satoshi Nakamoto.” This one was cracked in early 2018. It’s really too bad that the puzzle got solved as Bitcoin was losing so much value at the time because solving it needed more than three years.
So are you feeling competitive? Creative? If you are, you can always redirect your browser to the contest’s website and try your hand at the clues that the game master has published so far. Good luck!
Image courtesy of Pixabay.
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