Securing Wealth in Poetry

February 11, 2019, 15:34 UTC. Coinmonks on Medium publishes Securing Wealth in Poetry, by an account called OneSourGrape. Subtitle: "What if you could embed your net worth in a story?". Eleven minutes of reading about refugees, gold and steganography. Then the last lines:

If you’ve read this far, you’ve read every word required to access a wallet with .03 BTC. Good luck!

And right under it, the address. 0.03 BTC, and it's still there.

What's in the essay

It opens with the author's grandfather. A merchant family in 1930s China, gold yuanbao sewn into a shirt lining, a boat to Taiwan priced at up to ten taels, a new life there and later in Canada. Then fiat money as a tool of control, from China to Zimbabwe to Venezuela. Then bitcoin as the thing you can't confiscate, except for one weak spot.

That weak spot is the "touchpoints". A private key looks like a private key. A numbered list of twelve words looks like a password to money. Border guards will learn to spot both. The essay shows one of each, just so you know what they look like: a hex key and the phrase witch collapse practice feed shame open despair creek road again ice least. Funny thing, that phrase isn't BIP39 at all. witch, collapse, shame and least aren't on the BIP39 list. All twelve words are on Electrum's old wordlist, though.

Then steganography, "hidden writing" as opposed to "secret writing". Invisible ink, microdots, and a null cipher: "Fishing freshwater bends and saltwater coasts…", third letter of each word, "Send Lawyers, Guns, and Money".

And finally the "trithemian seed", named after Johannes Trithemius and his Steganographia. Seed words sit inside an ordinary story, next to decoy words, and something else says which ones count. The essay gives two worked examples:

• Story & phone number. A short story about an old palace, then two phone numbers for Eric and Carl on another page. The digits turn into word positions: (2,6,9,18,22,25,45,70,86,100,113,116.).
• Letter & GPS location. A lawyer's letter about a Supreme Court case, then the court's coordinates, 38.8906° N, 77.0044° W. Every digit read goes up by ten, so 21.493021 means 2, 11, 24, 39, 43, 50, 62, 71.

The essay says the method isn't meant to be uncrackable. It's meant to keep anyone from even wondering whether there's something to crack. And then it claims its own text is exactly that.

What the chain shows

The coins came first. 3,050,269 sat landed on 2019-02-10 at 14:47 UTC, one day before the essay went up. On 2019-04-08 someone sent another 74,361 sat. Nothing has left the address since.

The essay made a promise, too: "If the amount is not accessed by the end of 2020, we will donate the contents of the account to GiveDirectly.org/refugees." The end of 2020 came and went, and the coins never moved. Whatever happened with the donation, it didn't come from this wallet.

The account went by Sharon & Philippe for a while. Then it took the handle @Trithemius, so the essay is signed Trithemius today and @onesourgrape links go nowhere. More on the author page.

What the Securing Wealth in Poetry record carries

export const wealthInPoetryPuzzle = bitcoinPuzzle({
  id: "wealth-in-poetry",
  address: p2pkh("1K4ezpLybootYF23TM4a8Y4NyP7auysnRo", "c6233aeb…ec6e355a"),
  sourceUrl: ARTICLE,
  startedAt: "2019-02-11 15:34:04",
  prize: 0.03050269,
  hints: [official("The beauty of trithemian seeds is that they hide in plain sight. …", ARTICLE)],
  transactions: [funding(/* 2019-02-10, 0.03050269 BTC */), increase(/* 2019-04-08, 74,361 sat */)],
  assets: assets({ puzzle: "puzzle.txt", sourceUrl: CAPTURE }),
});

One hint, the closing line

The author said exactly one thing about the puzzle: you've already read every word you need. That's the hint. The phone numbers and GPS digits are examples of the method, not instructions for this wallet. Nobody who could say otherwise ever did.

Started at the essay, funded before it

startedAt is the publication time, 15:34:04 UTC, straight from Medium's own firstPublishedAt. The funding keeps its own date, a day earlier. prize is what the author put in, 0.03050269 BTC. The essay rounds it to .03. The 74,361 sat from April is an increase.

The text

For a puzzle like this, the text is the puzzle. assets/wealth-in-poetry/puzzle.txt is the essay as the Wayback Machine saw it on publication day. It's one paragraph per block, headings and image captions included, taken from the paragraph list Medium ships inside the page. The rendered HTML says the same thing. The only difference is typography: no-break spaces that keep the last two words of a heading, caption or pull quote together, and hair spaces around the dashes. The file keeps the plain spaces the author typed. The pictures aren't in it.

A singleton id, no name segment

wealth-in-poetry is the whole identifier, like brave-new-world, gsmg and the other singletons. One puzzle, one key, no slash.

The Securing Wealth in Poetry record

bitcoinPuzzle({
  address: p2pkh("1K4ezpLyboot…7auysnRo", "c6233aeb3a50…ec6e355a"),
})