TORCHED H34R7S Bitcoin Puzzle

A painting with a Bitcoin private key hidden in its flames. Not a metaphor, an actual wallet key. TORCHED H34R7S is the final piece of The Legend of Satoshi Nakamoto, created by coin_artist with Rhea Myers. Its 1FLAMEN6 wallet was claimed in February 2018, almost three years after the painting's public release.

What was hidden in the painting?

The April 3, 2015 announcement offered 4.87 BTC at 1FLAMEN6rq2BqMnkUmsJBqCGWdwgVKcegd. The forum thread started in 2014, but this record starts with the final painting's release. Earlier stages of the hunt aren't separate records here.

The flames carry binary data. Each one's height, border colour, width and interior colour encode four bits. Read the inner border clockwise and the outer border counterclockwise. The ribbons around the painted key give the repeating XOR mask, 011010. The key was, quite literally, drawn on the canvas.

Motherboard's solution account explains the decoding and includes confirmation from the creators. The recovered text refers to Shakespeare's The Phoenix and the Turtle and contains the wallet key. The image above is served from this site. Its public mirror identifies the preserved source.

Does the published key actually match 1FLAMEN6?

Yes, with an uncompressed public key. Use compressed serialization and you'll get a different address. Same private scalar, wrong wallet. That's an easy detail to miss when checking an old Bitcoin puzzle with current defaults.

The published private key derives 1FLAMEN6rq2BqMnkUmsJBqCGWdwgVKcegd. Its public key also appears in the claim transaction's input scripts. So the record doesn't rely only on a solved badge or an empty balance.

puzzles show coin_artist/torched-h34r7s
puzzles verify coin_artist/torched-h34r7s

The second command checks the recorded key against the address locally. No explorer or account needed.

4.87 BTC prize, almost 5 BTC claimed

Those numbers describe different things. 4.87 BTC is the advertised prize. The claim transaction spent 5.001337 BTC and paid 4.99676152 BTC after fees. It was confirmed on February 1, 2018 at 15:09:42 UTC.

The record keeps the advertised prize separate from the claim amount: 5.001337 BTC spent from the target before fees. Its solvedAt is that confirmation time, not a claim to know when someone finished decoding the painting. Later dust deposits and sweeps don't rewrite the original result.

Who solved it?

Motherboard calls the solver "Isaac" and explicitly says the name was changed. That's not a verified identity, so the dataset leaves the solver field empty. The solution note keeps the sources and transaction accounting together.