Keir Finlow-Bates

Who this is

A blockchain author who also runs Chainfrog, per his GitHub profile. He writes on Medium as kf106. In late 2020 he self-published Move Over Brokers, Here Comes The Blockchain. And he hid eight Bitcoin keys in it, which is the part that matters here.

Why hide keys in a book?

Marketing, he says, and he means it. His retrospective opens with "This is a marketing article". The book got a bold red cover, a punk soundtrack and over two hundred people credited in the preface. Plus a treasure hunt. Honestly, the hunt is the best marketing idea on that list.

He picked 0.002 BTC per lot, roughly the bitcoin per person. The eight English lots cost him about $270 at the time. Then the Italian edition got four lots of its own, after the price had more than doubled.

Does he know the answers?

No. "I do not have a record of the private keys for any of the twelve puzzles out there", he wrote in 2025. No notes either. He calls that the beauty of a Bitcoin hunt: once it's out, it belongs to the seekers. Bold move for an author. Every answer the dataset holds came from a reader. Would you trust yourself to forget twelve keys?

The record

static readonly author = party("Keir Finlow-Bates", {
  key: "keir-finlow-bates",
  kind: PartyKind.Person,
  about: "Blockchain author and founder of Chainfrog who hid twelve Bitcoin keys in his own book and its Italian translation, then forgot them on purpose.",
  profiles: [
    profile("medium", "https://kf106.medium.com/"),
    profile("github", "https://github.com/kf106"),
  ],
  facts: [
    fact("Hid eight private keys in Move Over Brokers, Here Comes The Blockchain and sent 0.002 BTC to each address …", ARTICLE, { date: "2025-09-11" }),
    fact("Designed four more puzzles for the Italian edition, Scansatevi Broker, …", ARTICLE, { date: "2025-09-11" }),
    fact("Wrote that he keeps no record of the twelve private keys and no notes on how the puzzles were built.", ARTICLE, { date: "2025-09-11" }),
    fact("Runs Chainfrog Oy as its CEO and founder.", "https://github.com/kf106"),
  ],
});