Brave New World

October 8, 2020, 09:25 UTC. A Reddit account called stsh_n posts to its own profile. Title: "Bitcoin puzzle (2000$)". Body: one picture. No rules, no hint, no "good luck". The address in the picture holds 0.2 BTC, roughly the two grand from the title at the time. And it had been sitting there since May.

What's in the picture

Pretty much all of 2020, in one collage.

"Welcome to the BRAVE NEW WORLD" in the middle, built from tiny handwriting that quotes the Bitcoin whitepaper. Behind it, huge and faded, "FIND THE SEED PHRASE". That's the only instruction you get.

Then the year itself. George Floyd with "05.25.20" and "I can't BREATHE". Black Lives Matter slogans. Surveillance cameras. A statue with a bag over its head. The pyramid from the dollar bill. A clock face. Trump and Biden nose to nose over "11.03.20", a big red question mark between them. The Statue of Liberty holds a tablet that says BLM, with "1865-202…?" next to her and "ONLY real BITCOIN" on the pedestal.

And runes. Four places: top left, down the right edge, along the bottom, next to the question mark.

The address? Rotated, up the left edge: 1KfZGvwZxsvSmemoCmEV75uqcNzYBHjkHZ. Easy to miss the first time.

Why some lists say BLM

Because of that tablet and the slogans. floflo777's open-crypto-puzzles files it as BLM, for example. The key here goes with what the picture calls itself.

What the chain shows

The coins came before the puzzle. 0.2 BTC landed on 2020-05-10 at 08:01 UTC, five months before the post.

After that, silence. Until strangers started tipping it. 1000 sat in October 2023, 100,000 in December 2024, then 557 and 5727 in 2025. Tiny, but somebody still cares. The address has received 20,107,284 sat in total and spent exactly zero.

Over two hundred comments by now. Rune translations, word lists, orderings, permutation counts that get scarier every year. stsh_n isn't in any of them, at least not in the Arctic Shift archive of Reddit. The coins don't move.

What the Brave New World record carries

export const braveNewWorldPuzzle = bitcoinPuzzle({
  id: "brave-new-world",
  address: p2pkh("1KfZGvwZxsvSmemoCmEV75uqcNzYBHjkHZ", "bd031e54…a1779eb0"),
  sourceUrl: THREAD,
  startedAt: "2020-10-08 09:25:30",
  prize: 0.2,
  transactions: [funding(/* 2020-05-10, 0.2 BTC */), increase(/* … four top-ups */)],
  assets: assets({ puzzle: "puzzle.png", sourceUrl: PICTURE }),
});

No hints, on purpose

The author gave a title and a picture. That's it. The rune readings in the thread might be right, might be nonsense, and nobody who could say ever did. A hint on this record means the author said it, so the list stays empty.

Started at the post, funded before it

startedAt is the post, because that's when anyone could start looking. The funding keeps its own date, five months earlier. The four tips are increase entries, and prize stays 0.2, what the author put in.

The picture

assets/brave-new-world/puzzle.png is the file Reddit serves for the post, 1600 by 1200. Full size matters here, the runes are small. assetUrl() points at it on GitHub.

A singleton id, no name segment

brave-new-world is the whole identifier, like picture-puzzle, gsmg and the other singletons. One puzzle, one key, no slash.

The Brave New World record

bitcoinPuzzle({
  address: p2pkh("1KfZGvwZxsvS…zYBHjkHZ", "bd031e54cde2…a1779eb0"),
})