Bitcoin (BTC) Reward Extracted from Paris Mural Puzzle

The puzzle weaved into Pascal Boyart’s latest mural, Liberty Leading the People, has been solved and the reward claimed.

The latest puzzle by Paris artist Pascal Boyart has been solved, extracting the total reward of 0.28 BTC on January 13 in one single transaction. The mural, titled Liberty Leading the People 2019, mimicked the famous work by Eugene Delacroix while referencing the Paris protesters known as the Yellow Jackets.

The artist himself revealed part of the solution:

https://twitter.com/pascalboyart/status/1084485975361896449

The puzzle contained a 12-word seed phrase scattered around the mural and written in black light paint or concealed within the visible background. The seed phrase was non-random, chosen to contain words pertinent to the anti-bank, anti-authority message that Boyart has included in his art in the past. The words are: banker, usury, lie, people, fight, hope, union, citizen, lead, triumph, horizon, and yellow.

But not all the words were written out as is, with various forms of encryption used to make the puzzle more involved.

“The first 6 words are hidden in the background as color strokes that hide words in binary from 6 basic colors (2 color bands for each letter),” Boyart explained.

The complete phrase would be used to produce the wallet private key, derived directly from the words, without using additional “salt.” Seed phrases are one of the intuitive ways to remember a Bitcoin address, potentially turning it into a “brain wallet” if the words are memorized.

Before the solution of the puzzle, there were suggestions that one needed to physically visit the mural. The high-quality reproduction would not have allowed users to view the dark light key, limiting the number of potential claimants to those that physically visited the mural.

The solution arrived within days of the new work being unveiled. Previous famous puzzles of this type took years to solve.

Unfortunately, the reward was claimed at a time when BTC market prices have resumed their slide, dropping below the $3,600 range. In the early hours on Monday, BTC retreated to $3,546.14 and hovered around $3,500.

Cryptocurrency puzzles containing a reward are common within the crypto space, but most are not open to the wider public and require programming experience to solve. Bounties are another way to get a reward for solving difficult problems.