Walking Banks seed hunt
A murder mystery where the victims carry a seed phrase in their DNA. Fun premise. Then AH White made it real.
On September 5, 2024, two deposits landed on one wallet, 100,000 sats and 700,000 sats. The next day the author posted the whole novel as a free PDF on Nostr. The seed is somewhere in that book. Nobody has found it. Two years on, both deposits are still there.
Walking Banks seed hunt
bitcoin
A thriller whose murder victims carry a seed phrase in their DNA, and a real one hidden in the book. Four words decode on page 122. The other twenty, and 800,000 sats, are still out there.
- Author
- AH White
- Prize recorded
- 0.008 BTC
- Still unsolved
- 2 · 0.008 BTC
Census
- unsolved
- 2100%
- public keys
- 2100%
- private keys
- 00%
Access
- Load
getCollection("walking-banks") - Showwalking-banks/2 in the playground
- Listall 2 in the playground
Hints
- undated
officialNestled within the chapters of "Walking Banks" lie hints to a genuine bitcoin treasure, just waiting for a reader to uncover it.
Sourcewalkingbanks.comConfirmweb.archive.org
- undated
officialThe book holds information that, when pieced together, unveil a seed phrase to a wallet containing real bitcoin; 0.008 BTC, or 800,000 Satoshis to be precise.
Sourcewalkingbanks.comConfirmweb.archive.org
- 2024-09-06
officialxiiithirdiiicrystaliiismalliiiadviceiiireflectxxxxxxcrystaliiismalliiiadviceiiireflectxxxxxxcrystaliiismalliiiadviceiiireflectiiithirdiiix
- 2024-09-06
official“‘Crystal, small, advice, and reflect’ are words belonging to a list that is used to make up a bitcoin seed phrase which normally consists of twenty four words,” she said, pointing to the words on the screen. “And considering the context, I’d say they are to be entered as the third list of words in a longer seed phrase that will give you access to Liang Wei’s fortune stored on a wallet on the bitcoin blockchain.”
- 2025-05-19
officialIf your up for a treasure hunt, the book contains a real Bitcoin seed phrase hidden within the story. So if you can piece the right string of words together, it leads to a wallet with 800000 sats in it.
Sourcenjump.me/note1vm2c020vsrkvg077m3tptta2n44j2qez20zk65j6eeh3ta652jysd69g2q
- 2025-05-19
officialIt's 24 words...if the wallet is not emptied after some time, I'll start dropping some hints from time to time
Sourcenjump.me/note1rmyu92ufwfl2nukzn2njlfynegu6jqyxhejc3207lztm5v3pugrsty535z
- 2025-11-21
officialDid you know that word repetitions are actually allowed in a seed phrase?
Sourcenjump.me/note1s29pn8p95u334wqspvyj2lm8naelfcel02zqxqk9h5t9kxmsq43q39zh0k
- 2026-03-16
officialSo here some straightforward clues: the book contains the words to a 24-word see phrase in the right order.
Sourcenjump.me/note15ys0tl7dyjy3lgah9n4n8360lamefqe40w2d7d9asdgmk3km5ngsxpzqrp
How the Walking Banks hunt works
Read the book, find the words
The rules fit in two sentences on the author's site:
The book holds information that, when pieced together, unveil a seed phrase to a wallet containing real bitcoin; 0.008 BTC, or 800,000 Satoshis to be precise.
That's it. No riddle page, no puzzle numbers. Just a novel and a wallet. walkingbanks.com has since expired, so the records read it through the Wayback Machine. The treasure outlived its own domain.
Page 122 shows how it's done
122 is the number printed on the page. The PDF viewer calls it 128. There, a lab decodes an intron someone planted in a victim's DNA. This string comes out:
xiiithirdiiicrystaliiismalliiiadviceiiireflectxxxxxxcrystaliiismalliiiadviceiiireflectxxxxxxcrystaliiismalliiiadviceiiireflectiiithirdiiix
The characters work it out on the next page. "Third" appears twice, every other word three times. The repeats are error correction against mutations, and the words are BIP39. Then Ying says it out loud: crystal, small, advice and reflect go in "as the third list of words" of a longer seed. If every list holds four words, that's positions 9 to 12.
So the book teaches the decoder on itself. Nice touch. Too bad it only does it once.
The hints came slowly
The author promised hints if the wallet stayed full. They're short, and every one is on the record with its Nostr note:
- May 2025: it's 24 words.
- November 2025: word repetitions are allowed in a seed phrase.
- March 2026: the book contains the words in the right order.
That last one sounds generous. Is it? It rules out a shuffle, sure. It doesn't say where the other five lists are.
Two addresses, one seed
Why the collection has two records
One 24-word seed funds two native SegWit addresses. walking-banks/1 holds 100,000 sats and walking-banks/2 holds 700,000, numbered in the order they were funded. Each gets its own record, like the Dug hunt does, because each is a separate prize on the chain. Find the seed and you take both.
The site published an xpub, not an address
The Find the Treasure section linked the wallet's xpub on blockchain.com. That key is the account level of the wallet, so it derives every address the seed can show. Read it as native SegWit and child 0/0 and 0/1 are exactly the two funded addresses. Both records carry that xpub, with the paths m/84'/0'/0'/0/0 and m/84'/0'/0'/0/1. The author never said 84, so that part is the native SegWit convention, not her word. The xpub is hers, though. Got a candidate seed? Derive its account key and compare. One string match away from 800,000 sats.
Read it as legacy and you get an empty wallet. floflo777 points out that most explorers do just that. And in August 2025 the author answered a reader that no transaction showed up, not even the deposits. The coins were there the whole time. The explorer was looking in the wrong drawer.
What's still open in Walking Banks
Everything past those four words. floflo777's write up covers the free PDF, the site text and the audiobook narration. Acrostics, typography, a search for more strings like that one. Only the page 122 string came out. Their best lead is to ask the author whether the free PDF holds all 24 words at all.
Twenty words of 2048 each is far past any search. Four missing words is about a day on one GPU, by floflo777's estimate. So the hunt is waiting for one more hint, or one more reader. Maybe you?