Move Over Brokers treasure hunt

Summer 2020. Keir Finlow-Bates has writer's block. So he reads about book treasure hunts instead, Kit Williams' Masquerade and Christopher Manson's Maze. Then he gets an idea. Why bury a golden hare when a private key fits on a page?

He hid eight keys in Move Over Brokers, Here Comes The Blockchain. Each address got 0.002 BTC, a few days before the book came out. Why 0.002? That's roughly the bitcoin there is per person. The Italian translation, Scansatevi Broker, got four more lots in September 2021. Writer's block, cured the fun way.

How the Move Over Brokers hunt works

The keys are in the book

There's no puzzle page and no labels. Each puzzle hides in the prose or in a figure. The hunt announcement at the end of the English book sets the rules in two lines:

You hold the source of each and every key in your hands... as long as you have a physical copy, that is. Note that there are plenty of red herrings too.

Red herrings, in a book about blockchain. Fair warning.

Hash the answer three times

The same section closes with a line in ROT13. Decoded, it says: "In many cases, you'll have to hash the answer three times." That's the whole recipe. Take the answer string, run SHA-256 over it, then over the digest bytes, then once more. The result is the private key, with an uncompressed P2PKH address on top. The records tag it triple-sha256-brainwallet.

"In many cases" carries a lot of weight there, though. Two lots are BIP39 phrases. Two read the key straight out of a figure. The red herrings weren't a joke.

The author forgot on purpose

In his 2025 retrospective Keir lists all twelve addresses. He also says he has no record of the keys and no notes on how the puzzles were built. "I try not to think about them at all." So no hint is coming from the author, ever. The hunt belongs to the readers now.

Who solved the Move Over Brokers puzzles

Three lots in ten weeks

Keir thought the puzzles were harder than they were. en-easy-2 moved on January 4, 2021, five weeks after funding. en-medium-2 followed six days later, and en-very-hard-1 on February 5. en-easy-1 held out until January 2022, it-easy until February 2022. None of those players said how.

floflo777 shows up in 2026

Then nothing for four years. In June 2026 floflo777 took en-hard-1, then en-hard-2, then two Italian lots in July. Every key went public in open-crypto-puzzles, with the payout txids next to it.

And then floflo777 went back to the lots other people had already emptied. A section titled "Elementary, my dear Watson" plus a planted 221 gives 221B Baker Street. Hash it three times and you get the key to en-easy-1. Sherlock would approve.

The ISBN is the best joke in the book

en-easy-2, the first lot anyone claimed, is 9781688289970. That's the ISBN of the paperback, printed on its back cover. The Kindle edition has an ASIN and no ISBN. So "as long as you have a physical copy" was literal all along. The easiest lot in the hunt was a barcode.

What's still open in Move Over Brokers

3 lots still hold their 0.002 BTC: en-medium-1, en-very-hard-2 and it-very-hard. floflo777's notebook logs a long list of misses against them. It covers chapters hashed whole, page numbers, every ISBN of every edition, even a proof of work search over Figure 11. Nothing matched.

Their best lead is boring and probably right. Buy the paperback. Some answer could sit on a page the ebook doesn't have. Got an original print run on your shelf?

What the Move Over Brokers records carry

Derived keys and published keys

Nobody printed a key for en-easy-1 or en-easy-2. The answers are public, the recipe is public, so the record runs it and marks the key .derived(). The four lots floflo777 took have their keys published, so verify() checks those as quoted.

export const moveOverBrokersEnEasy1 = puzzle({
  id: "move-over-brokers/en-easy-1",
  chain: "bitcoin",
  address: "14aFhno96fkt7knLWMDQ4j8yh8v5hBF4n1",
  sourceUrl: ARTICLE,
  startedAt: "2020-11-28 16:24:07",
  status: Status.Solved,
  key: hex("72048596fda6013a976c22ac4d0b1dbc29a3ca624f4740a64b195ad10f4e1b89")
    .wif("5JgW1WrxCgC4275UqHQfTVpdnyEPJDaaSf76VPCC7Q6KX14Cunc")
    .passphrase("221B Baker Street")
    .derived(),
  techniques: [technique("triple-sha256-brainwallet", SOLUTION)],
  prize: 0.002,
});

A test hashes every passphrase tagged triple-sha256-brainwallet three times and compares it with the key. Every tagged record rebuilds, the published it-hard key included.

Claimed, with the recipe and without the key

en-medium-2 is a 16 by 16 bitmap in Figure 9, read row by row as key bits. One column isn't drawn, and floflo777 published the missing bits, 0xb968. But the bitmap itself lives only in the book. No key, so the lot stays claimed, with the method as a published answer. en-very-hard-1 and it-easy are claimed too, and nobody knows their answers.

The retrospective swaps two Italian lots

Keir's article marks the Italian medium address solved on February 18, 2022, and the easy one open. The chain says the opposite. 1MEstvLAzc5DzJtvx7uyvKNNUCPN3ofWMK, the easy one, moved that day. The medium one waited until July 2026. The records keep his difficulty labels and the chain's dates. Easy mistake when you forgot the answers on purpose.

The Move Over Brokers puzzle records