Last week, an enigmatic and fiendishly tough puzzle that had baffled bitcoiners for years was lastly solved. In the course of, it earned the particular person who cracked it a 5 BTC jackpot and introduced new acclaim to the workforce behind the mission. After being launched in 2015, at the top of the bitcoin bear market, the puzzle attracted a flurry of curiosity. As the months handed and nobody stepped ahead to declare the prize, curiosity in the puzzle waned, till final week’s sudden information that its mysteries had been decoded.
Satoshi, Shakespeare and the $50,000 Puzzle
1FLAMEN6 was the identify assigned to a infamous bitcoin handle created in 2015. The notoriety got here on account of the 5 BTC locked inside it. The cash have been anybody’s to declare, however to unlock them they’d have to remedy a visible puzzle that had baffled a few of crypto’s biggest minds and best armchair detectives. The Legend of Satoshi Nakamoto is a visually wealthy portray by @coin_artist, who devised the board game-inspired paintings along side fellow crypto inventive Rob Myers. It was evident that the portray contained clues that might reveal the key to the bitcoin pockets, however these clues have been so obscure and esoteric as to thwart all makes an attempt to crack them.
That’s till a 30-year-old programmer working below the pseudonym of Isaac stepped ahead and helped himself to the prize. Motherboard spoke to the code-cracking genius, who confessed that holding bitcoin wasn’t protected in his nation, therefore the need to protect his anonymity. Isaac solely discovered of the puzzle a month in the past, however in three weeks made extra progress than the crypto neighborhood had made in the previous three years. Encoded in the portray, Isaac found, was the key to the bitcoin pockets prefaced by the phrase “B34u7y, truth, and rarity”, put there to sign that its finder had been profitable.
17th Century Wisdom Meets 21st Century Tech
The phrase encoded in the portray is taken from a William Shakespeare poem known as The Phoenix and the Turtle. The poem, like its creator, is a topic of some thriller and far hypothesis. The similar may be mentioned of Satoshi Nakamoto in fact, who the portray was named after. @coin_artist defined to Motherboard how the inclusion of Shakespeare was “important to me because events flipped my life upside down and I created this piece at rock bottom. The painting was also created during the toughest part of the bear market and those original bitcoins I loaded into that address were half of everything I had to my name. It was essentially a prayer that things would get better.”
@coin_artist created the portray whereas her fellow artist Rob Myers assist encode the key which was hidden in it, utilizing flames round its border and ribbons tied to the key to correspond to binary strings. The full story of how Isaac went on to decode the remainder of the clues is a prolonged however fascinating one. Thanks to the variety of bitcoin forks which have occured since the 1FLAMEN6 pockets was loaded with 5 BTC, the last prize is in actual fact larger than $50,000.
Conveniently for @coin_artist, the puzzle was solved at the similar time as she was in search of to promote her newest mission, Neon District, a blockchain RPG recreation set in a dystopian future. In conserving with its designer’s methodology, the recreation is loaded with easter eggs which, when solved, will assist gamers uncover a grand prize of some description. Coincidences apart, cryptocurrency and cryptographic puzzles are a mind-boggling match made in heaven.
Did you attempt to remedy the bitcoin puzzle after it was introduced in 2015? Let us know in the comments part below.
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