Coin_Games weekly banknote puzzles
December 4, 2017. A post on r/bitcoinpuzzles asks whether the subreddit is coming back to life. New Weekly Bitcoin Puzzles! Three images, three addresses, three tiny prizes. 2,020 sats, then 3,301, then 6,661. The makers? "Coin_Pro and Valhalla Games Unlimited."
Tiny, yes. One commenter said it out loud: "the prize is so small there's no real reason to be secretive". Fair point. Did anyone listen?
Coin_Games weekly banknote puzzles
bitcoin
Banknotes stuffed with skulls, lions and statues, a few thousand sats each. Every prize emptied by somebody who never said how.
- Author
- Coin_Pro
- Prize recorded
- 0.00011982 BTC
- Still unsolved
- none
Census
- claimed
- 3100%
- public keys
- 3100%
- private keys
- 00%
Access
- Load
getCollection("coin-games") - Showcoin-games/2 in the playground
- Listall 3 in the playground
What were the Coin_Games puzzles?
A Webnode site, coingames6, still online. CO||N GAMES on top, "Powered by: VALHALLA GAMES UNL||M||TED" under it, COIN_PRO in the footer. The site promised a puzzle a week until the new year, each one worth more than the last.
One banknote a week
Every puzzle is a fake banknote. Week 1 is black and green, with a skull wearing question marks for eyes and two lines of letters and digits along the bottom. Week 2 puts a lion in front of Stonehenge, with 3301 printed on the note. Week 3 is an XES note with the Venus de Milo, the pyramids and a mushroom cloud. Its file name is 1337330119992020.png. Subtle it isn't.
The originals sat on Tinypic, which is gone. The site's own copies still load, and the repo keeps them byte for byte. All of them ship in assets/coin-games.
Week 1 got five redraws
On December 12 the site said "The Image has now been updated to help solvers out!". Then came more. Version 3, version 4, a "FINAL CLUE", an "EXTRA". The skull turns into a green portrait, a statue walks in from the left, a tree grows on the right. The record keeps the first note as the puzzle and the five redraws as hint files.
Ten, sixteen and twelve words
The home page gives each puzzle a difficulty and a word count. Week 1 is "Easy 10 words". Week 2 is "Medium 16 Words", week 3 "Medium 12 Words". Ten and sixteen aren't BIP39 lengths, so at least two of the three were no standard seed.
Who emptied the Coin_Games prizes?
Nobody who said so. No solution post, no key, no name.
Week 1: "Solved! (Or stolen?)"
The prize left on December 14, 2017, at 08:13:31 UTC. The site posted the same day: "Prize amount claimed. Blockchain Error? Investigating..." The claim is a strange one. It swept the 2,020 sats together with three other inputs and paid 195,995 sats in fees to send 170,599 on. Nearly a hundred times the prize, burned on the way out. The home page still reads "Solved! (Or stolen?)". Good question, honestly.
Weeks 2 and 3 stayed "Active"
The home page's last update is dated January 6, 2018. Both remaining puzzles say "Active" there to this day. The chain says otherwise. Week 3 was emptied on March 5, 2018, week 2 on August 19, 2018. No post, no write-up, no key. So all three records say claimed, with the spend and the address the coins went to.
Funded before their week came
The site dates the puzzles November 19, November 26 and December 3. The chain disagrees. Weeks 1 and 3 were funded in the same block, 495180, on November 20 at 04:37:55 UTC. Week 2 followed one block later. So the "weekly" prizes were all on the table from day one. startedAt keeps the dates the site gives weeks 2 and 3, and preGenesis says the coins got there first.
Where are puzzles #4 to #7?
On the home page, without addresses. #4 is "UNKNOWN Account" at .00013371 BTC. #5 adds 7.771 OHM to .00007771 BTC, #6 adds 17,771 OACoin to .00017771 BTC. #7 says "Funding Unsuccessful". The pages of #4 to #6 show a picture and a price, nothing more.
No address, no record. If one turns up, the week gets its number back.
Who is Coin_Pro?
The footer says "COIN_PRO / DJ, Producer, Programmer / 2017". That's about all. The author page has the rest.
The thread came from u/3301J, who wrote it like a fan tip: "they are doing weekly prizes". Yet 3301J answered the one question in the comments with the Discord invite the home page links. In 2019 the same account offered an indie RPG called Holy Order for sale. The home page teases "The Holy Order : Comming 2018". Same person? Maybe. No single source says so, so the record keeps the two names apart.
The thread is archived in assets/sources/coin-games, from a June 2023 capture.