I've tried solving bitcoin puzzles before ... I think most people who "surf the web" in 2025 have tried a puzzle before and found them impossibly difficult. When I was younger, I thought ARGs and those types of "internet mysteries" were interesting. Now that I'm older, I'm more interested in "going for the gold" ... pun intended. Below is an unsolved Btc puzzle that I managed to find when i sniffed around for the first time in years. The image contains a seed phrase. The prize is worth 0.2 BTC.
But, that's not the puzzle I want to solve. [Although a lot of the clues seem to be solved]. Whenever runes are involved I always check out mentally anyways. And they always translate into another language ... it's really confusing. Plus, it's best to start with the easiest puzzle first. By the way, I found these puzzles on https://privatekeys.pw/ which has 4 unsolved puzzled and 2 "partially solved" puzzles although one is literally just a brute forcing challenge. That is boring and random.
The puzzle i gravitated towards is worth 0.03 BTC. I like it because its straight cryptography ... no trial and error trying a bunch of weird sht ... making the image a word doc, filtering the images etc. The seed passphrase is just hidden in the article. Actually it does say "embedded in the article" so it could very well be a clue within the images or some bull**t like that. Le sigh But, I will be trying some normal cryptography first, MAYBE do some quick contrasting and light adjustments in gimp too.
There seems to be a major focus on something called a "trithemian seed" and unless that is a red herring I think this is the key to solving the puzzle. Although you never know with these feindish puzzle makers: I could filter the image the right way and every seed could be there. And some weird meme that says did it for the LOLZ. But, I'm like 90% sure it's a cryptography puzzle.
These are the examples in the article and it doesn't take a genius to figure out that these are probably the keys also. The problem with this is that when you put the numbers against the article, there are redundancies [you can't use words like "the" in the seed phrases]. Google ai claims that the word "as" is in the seed phrases, but not according to the official list!
This begs the question ... what are the keys used with? **One of the first things I checked was this highlighted word "time." I thought I was a genius because I thoguht to check the wayback machine and guess what! THE HIGHLIGHT ISNT THERE! Which means it's most likely not a clue because why would the clue be added later. It's good to work backwards sometimes. Speaking of working backwards, remember earlier I mentioned things being embedded. Well, I remembered that links are embedded if they dont show the URL. There are actual multiple references to embedding things.
A quick head count shows over 20 embedded links.
Hopefully it's the first wiki article?
We can use the process of elimination at least if they use words not on the list.
Example: This tweet has less than 100 words but more than 12.
We can probably cross this link off the list.
Keep in mind that the example keys ... the things im assuming are keys are made from 2 things. Coordinates and phone numbers. So any obvious numbers and coordinates gets investigated. Things get REALLY complicated because there is a third "key", but it seems less likely. When I say less likely I just mostly hope this doesn't involve counting random, letters. Although this might be nice because it would be obvious once i find the correct embedded link and the 3rd letter of every word starts spelling other words: That won't happen randomly.
I hit some pretty hard brick walls and decided to regroup and look for more clues in the origonal text. I remembered a comment i saw at the bottom of the article about how the puzzle master invented the term "trithemian seed" which I think is very clever to point out. It could definitely be a clue. If you invent a new phrase, you get to define the word. Think about it!
I wanted to rule out image stenography so i did some forensics. The worst part of doing puzzles like this is dumping an image into a text reader and looking for English words. It's insanely tedious. There are just certain things that are easy to rule out. Anyways, I also want to rule out the possibility this is a book cypher ... which reminded me why I love doing this puzzle. It's teaching me a lot. Like looking up if you can make your own seed phrase. Obviously this matters, if you cannot make your own cypher than we could literally stop looking at the other articles, book cyphers etc.
Honestly, looking for the cypher in the actual book seems a bit mad. Speaking of mad ... I'm feeling a bit woozy from doing this all day. But, I actually think its a great hobby I'm going to get back into. It's nice to hyper focus on something instead of using my free time thinking about doom & gloom. And it's like a free version of the lottery because I can fantasize about what I'd do with $4000. Speaking of fantasy, if anyone wants to donate to my treasure hunting budget, I just made my first bitcoin address during this treasure hunt. bc1qky7t04vtsf0wku0y6v4np9482ged6ns9jthtx6
Congratulations @ferngully! You have completed the following achievement on the Hive blockchain And have been rewarded with New badge(s)
Your next target is to reach 30 posts.
You can view your badges on your board and compare yourself to others in the Ranking
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word
STOP