Path to Greatness

February 5, 2021, 19:02 UTC. A 50 second trailer goes up on the Path to Greatness YouTube channel, "Treasure Hunt Announcement". Justin Patterson builds that 3D parkour platformer on his own, and the free gameplay demo sits on Google Drive, a 128 MB Windows build whose files are dated the day before. You run an obstacle course, collect orbs, turn on lava if you want. And the demo is also "a delivery system for something else":

Clues can be found inside the demo, and will lead you to a Litecoin wallet's private key.

The prize is whatever that wallet holds. Donations raise it, and it has only grown. Nothing has ever left the address.

What's in the clues

By May 2021 the clues are on the web too. The hunt's page shows nine images, also as p2g_clues.zip. Five are rooms from the game, each with text on the far wall: a poem that starts "Imagine all the people", a scrambled block of letters, a grid of numbers titled "wasd", a chess position under a short verse, and a poem about the eight wonders with rows of symbols. A sixth room, 00111111, has sketches and faint marks. The last two are QR codes.

The ninth image is the one that explains the rest. It's a fake desktop with four windows:

• litecoin_wallet.txt: the address and the private key as a WIF, encrypted with a super_key. AES 256-bit, CBC, IV goodluck_havefun.
• super_key_segments.sheet: the super key in four encrypted segments of 8 bytes. Each one has its own IV and names the two clues that make its key, clue 1 + 6, 4 + 5, 3 + 7 and 2 + 8.
• clues.sheet: eight clues by name, imagine, scramble, wasd, chess, wonders, beach, ship and sky, with the segment each one feeds and its byte range. Two answers fill 32 bytes together.
• fix_clues.script: remove the spaces from every answer and lowercase all of them except clue 4. "A monkey on a typewriter wrote this at some point in time."

So the structure is out in the open. Eight answers, four AES keys, one super key, one WIF. The five room images are named after the first five clues. Beach, ship and sky don't appear as an image name anywhere, so those three are still somewhere in the pictures or in the demo.

The IVs are song titles

A month before the hunt, on January 7, 2021, Justin Patterson released an album, Seconds of Dream, thirteen tracks, also on Spotify. Put its track list next to the segment sheet. few_n_far_btween is track 1, Few and Far Between. nocturnal_sugars is track 6, Nocturnal Sugars. seconds_of_dream is the title track, which the game's channel posted back in 2019 as the Path to Greatness soundtrack. Only colors_on_leaves isn't on the album.

An IV isn't secret, so this opens nothing by itself. Three of four names off one album of his is still hard to call a coincidence.

The rules say it plainly: "The first and last steps are the only steps I will ever provide." Download the demo, and sweep the wallet. Everything in between is yours.

Nobody took it

July 25, 2021, the author posted the hunt to r/ARG: 3 LTC in the wallet, about $375 then. He was proud of the puzzles and was "having a hard time finding" the people who'd enjoy them. One commenter said they had figured some parts out. A month later he wrote that he knew of no online community working on it, "only a few private efforts through DMs".

What the chain shows

The first coins arrived on 2021-02-02 at 14:57 UTC, 0.03477051 LTC, three days before the trailer. Three more deposits came on February 5, hours before it. One on February 12 came from the second address the first site asked people to donate to, the one that split every donation between the game and the prize. Two more followed in May 2021, and the largest, 1.8999958 LTC, on 2021-07-22.

Eight deposits in all, and not a single spend. The page's own rule for the ending is the balance: "If the prize value shown above becomes zero (or close to zero), it means that someone has won and the treasure hunt is over." It isn't zero.

What the Path to Greatness record carries

export const treasureHunt = litecoinPuzzle({
  id: "path-to-greatness",
  address: p2pkh("LUtL7qnm3gzxKjHcfVLSjydqhhinTVmTmS", "69fb2ecb…3891b789"),
  sourceUrl: SITE,
  startedAt: "2021-02-05 19:02:37",
  prize: 3.02608794,
  hints: [
    official("Clues can be found inside the demo, and will lead you to a Litecoin wallet's private key.", OLD, confirmation(CAPTURE, …)),
    official("The first and last steps are the only steps I will ever provide.", RULES),
    official("The clues above will lead to a Litecoin wallet's private key.", SITE, confirmation(CLUES_CAPTURE, …)),
  ],
  transactions: [funding(/* 2021-02-02, 0.03477051 LTC */), increase(/* seven more, to 2021-07-22 */)],
  assets: assets({ puzzle: "computer-screen.jpg", hints: ["clue1-imagine.jpg", …, "qr2.jpg"], sourceUrl: "https://p2gtreasure.com/Clues/p2g_clues.zip" }),
});

Started at the trailer

startedAt is the moment the announcement trailer went public, 19:02:37 UTC, from YouTube's own publish date. The coins came first, three days earlier, and keep their own date on the funding.

The prize is the wallet

The first deposit was 0.03477051 LTC, and the author says the prize is the balance, donations included, so prize is everything the address received, 3.02608794 LTC. The first deposit is the funding, the other seven are increase.

Three hints, all the author's

Two come from the first site, which lives on under /old/: where the clues are and what they lead to, and the rule about the first and last steps. The third is the same promise on the current page, pointing at the images. The first and third carry a Wayback capture as their confirmation, from February and May 2021. The desktop image isn't retyped into a hint. It's the puzzle asset, and the other eight images are hint files, byte for byte the files in the author's zip.

No public key yet

The address has never spent, so the chain hasn't shown its key. pubkey stays absent until it does.

The Path to Greatness record

litecoinPuzzle({
  address: p2pkh("LUtL7qnm3gzx…inTVmTmS", "69fb2ecbe0ee…3891b789"),
})