La Liberté guidant le peuple 2019

January 2019. Ten years of Bitcoin. Pascal Boyart, PBoy on his canvases, picks a wall at 156 rue d'Aubervilliers in Paris. He paints Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People again. Only now the crowd wears yellow vests and gas masks.

Somewhere in the paint sits a wallet. On January 7 he posts the mural to r/Bitcoin with the address and 0.26 BTC in it. Alistair Milne paid for the prize. The location stays secret. "Not very hard to find", says the author. Six days later the coins are gone.

How the mural hid twelve seed words

The rule came first, on the announcement page. To solve it entirely, you have to stand in front of the wall. A photo only gets you part of the way. The author kept repeating that in the comments. "You can solve a part from your desk and other part you must see the wall in real life."

Seed 12 words, black on black

The first clue is the quietest one. At the far right, black paint on black wall, it says "Seed 12 words". So twelve BIP39 words, in order. But which list?

Six words in the coloured strokes

The background swirls hide six zones of short coloured strokes. Six base colours, two strokes per letter. The author's solution shows the decoding table, drawn by hand. It gives banquier usure mensonge peuple combat espoir. Banker, usury, lie, people, fight, hope. Yellow vest slogans, in BIP39.

Six words that glow under black light

Behind Marianne the white background carries fluorescent ink. Under UV it reads ATOUT, JPAVFLU, Y29uZHVpcmU=, dHJpb21waGU= and mq+cC6Ax2+8R8LAnEWgQnA==. Three tricks for six words:

• Caesar. ATOUT and JPAVFLU are shifted 20 and 19 letters. Back they come as union and citoyen.
• Base64. The next two decode to conduire and triomphe. The easy pair.
• AES-128. The last blob needs a key, and the wall doesn't have it. The author emailed 03012009 to whoever found the inscriptions. That's January 3, 2009, the genesis block, day first. It decrypts to horizon jaune.

Why French?

Because the words are French, and BIP39 has a French list. conduire and triomphe aren't in the English one, so once the Base64 pair came out, the list was settled. The record says so with .language("french"). Without it, verification reads banquier as an unknown English word and gives up.

Who solved La Liberté guidant le peuple?

Antoine Ferron and Marina, who goes by marabrito31. They live a few kilometres away, so they went on the first evening. The black on black text was easy. A street lamp's reflection gave away the first fluorescent word, and phone torches did the rest.

Base64 fell immediately. AES needed the key, so they emailed the address painted at the bottom right. Caesar took longer than it should have. They kept testing the first three letters as ATQ, and they were ATO. Once read right, the keys g and h gave union and citoyen.

Brute force, but a polite one

The colour strokes resisted. On January 9 Antoine came back with a blue LED torch and a lot of photos. Regex over the French list found four words that fit together, one colour pair per letter: banquier, usure, mensonge, espoir. Two left, probably six letters each.

That's 499 words and about 250,000 pairs, more if the order is open. So they wrote scanners, sped them up with coincurve to about 75 phrases a second per core, and cut the space by hand. Fifty plausible words, ten plausible orders. A script called Seekplace hit it after roughly an hour, on Sunday January 13. The claim confirmed at 12:44:40 UTC. Antoine wrote it all up for bitcoin.fr the next day. His tools are on GitHub.

Is the checksum valid?

Yes. Antoine skipped the BIP39 checksum in his scans, in case the author ignored it too. He didn't. The phrase passes, and m/44'/0'/0'/0/0 gives 1NqPw….

Rerun the steps yourself

import { get, verify } from "@agntn/puzzles";

const mural = await get("liberte-guidant-le-peuple");
await verify(mural!); // { verified: true, derivedAddress: "1NqPwPp7hEXZ3Atj77Ue11xAEMmXqAXwrQ", … }

The cipher steps rerun too. @agntn/ciphers gives UNION and CITOYEN from Caesar shifts 6 and 7, and @agntn/encodings reads the Base64 pair. AES is AES-128-CBC with 03012009 as ASCII, padded with zero bytes to sixteen. The author never printed an IV. The one that works, 12345678b0z2345n, comes from the solvers' decAES.sh, and it gives horizon jaune.

"That does not work"

The solution page translates the words for English readers: union citizen lead triumph. Somebody in the thread tried JPAVFLU plus 19 and got nonsense instead of CITIZEN. Of course. The wall says citoyen. The author's reply: "it's just a translation of the french words in english". Fair.

What happened after the claim

The French authorities painted over the mural in February 2019. The address kept getting coins. 1,000 sats in September 2019, gone two days later. In December 2019 someone sent 0.0578 BTC to a key the whole internet had read. It left in the same block, with 0.0031 BTC of that as a fee. A bot, most likely, and a fast one.

In May 2026 another 791 sats arrived. One sweep took them together with the dust on Natasha Otomoski and TORCHED H34R7S. Published keys are public property. Don't send anything there.

What the record carries

The prize is the 0.28916308 BTC the claim spent: about 0.26 BTC on January 6, plus the top-ups during the hunt. The first deposit was 26,300 sats on January 2, and the record calls that one funding. Both came before the post, so preGenesis is set. startedAt is the announcement page, 22:42:07 UTC. Every hint keeps its original language. Antoine is the record's solver. Marina appears by name in his record, because a puzzle holds one solver.

puzzle.jpg is the HD photo the author linked in his first comment. Byte for byte, it's what Imgur still serves and what the Wayback Machine caught in February 2019. The Reddit thread is archived in assets/sources/liberte-guidant-le-peuple, with its comments.

The La Liberté guidant le peuple record

puzzle({
  chain: "bitcoin",
  address: "1NqPwPp7hEXZ…mXqAXwrQ",
  status: Status.Solved,
  key: seed("banquier usu…on jaune", "m/44'/0'/0'/0/0").language("french"),
})