There is a treasure hunt that awaits to be unfolded. Recently, a Twitter user- ‘@notgrubles’ was sent a mysterious message via the Blockstream Satellite. In the message, there were details on $1 Million in BTC that are hidden in 1000 cryptographic keys, which are located at four different GPS coordinates. As per the mysterious message, the hunters have to find at least 400 out of them and to guess the correct location, in order to unravel the treasure.
More details on the treasure hunt will be revealed at a later point of time, as per the message. Here is how the mysterious message reads-
“Welcome, Hunter.
This message should reach you at the middle of the fourth month of your calendar year, in the year 2019. If you are reading this, something has led you to search for things which bring excitement to an otherwise predictable world. […] The treasure which will belong to the most successful Hunters and their clan is neither gold, nor jewels, nor the pieces of worthless paper that pass for money in this sad age; instead, it is Bitcoin, a digital treasure forged from deep mathematical truths, in an amount equal to $1 million.”
Shamir is an algorithm that is created by Israeli cryptographer Adi Shamir. The purpose of Shamir is to safeguard a secret in a distributed manner. The total has been further divided into 1000 pieces with the help of ‘splitting magic of the wizard Shamir.’ The rules of the treasure hunt expect the hunter to first find at least 400 pieces and then to rejoin them with the help of ‘Shamir’s spell of recombination.’
The sender of the message is not known. The sender claims that this kind of puzzle is neither the first of its kind nor the last. Further, the sender has thrown an open challenge to the recipient to prove the ability to win the prize. In the message, there is a mention that those who will have great cryptographic knowledge, will prove to be worthy of winning the prize.
The first cryptographic key-
Talking of the GPS locations, the participant of the puzzle would require to travel to three different locations out of twelve. The first of the three keys can be found at- (37.784038, -122.417812 Tenderloin, San Francisco), (40.758931, -73.985099 Broadway, New York), (34.062628, -118.129485 Monterey Park, CA), and (42.360342, -71.087282 Cambridge, MA). From today’s afternoon, the hunters can start their treasure hunt.
The second cryptographic key-
The second key can be found at four various locations (39.93685, 116.45426 Beijing Shi, China, 22.281185, 114.156715 Queen’s Road Central, Hong Kong, 35.654811, 139.748974 Minato City, Japan, and 37.583827, 127.031035 Seoul, South Korea), which are geographically on the other side of the globe. The hunters can start to hunt for these keys from midday tomorrow.
The third cryptographic key-
The hunters can start to hunt for the third key on 17th April midday. The third key is located somewhere among the four continents. The locations are- 51.5082944, -0.2013407 (Notting Hill, London), 0.3474019, 32.6036514 (Kampala, Uganda), -33.8881323, 151.1901988 (Camperdown NSW, Australia), and -34.596118, -58.373290 (Buenos Aires, Argentina).