Artists hiding things in paintings is nothing new. Da Vinci’s The Last Supper contains a 40-second-long piece of music written in bread rolls, his Mona Lisa has two letters (B/S or C/E, no one is quite sure) painted into her left pupil, and Michelangelo’s ‘The Sistine Chapel’ features almost the entire human nervous system spread out across the span of the painting. Over the past few years, a number of artists have taken a leaf out of these masters’ books and have begun hiding something altogether more tangible in their paintings – Bitcoin.
The Legend of Satoshi Nakamoto
The first publicly known hiding of Bitcoin in a painting occurred in 2015 when ‘The Legend of Satoshi Nakamoto’ was created by two digital artists, a picture that had hidden within it the private keys to a wallet that held almost five Bitcoin. This puzzle was finally solved after three years when, in February 2018, a programmer discovered the cipher hidden within the ribbons and the frame and claimed the prize, worth almost $50,000 at the time.
The painting is a #puzzle, there is 4.87 #bitcoin concealed by this image. Happy #EasterEgg http://t.co/2KASaawd3u pic.twitter.com/90kuCshXj1
— YT? (@coin_artist) April 3, 2015
310 Bitcoin Challenge
In October 2018, a Briton by the name of Pip went one step further and hid 310 Bitcoin in a black and white picture, calling the quest, sensibly, the 310 Bitcoin Challenge. The reward was split up into a number of wallets, with the private keys all buried somewhere in the picture. The windfall, worth over $2 million at the time, naturally caused a frenzy on social media, with digital detectives scrambling to work out how to crack the codes, resulting in the vast majority being discovered within a week. If you’ve got a few minutes to spare and a mind for ciphers however, the final wallet containing 0.31 BTC is still up for grabs.
Liberté Guidant le People 2019
Last month, French artist Pascal Boyart posted on his website that he had painted a mural, Liberté guidant le people, somewhere in Paris. Boyart’s mural, a nod to Paris’ yellow vest movement, contained clues that led to a wallet containing 0.28 BTC, which would go to the first person to crack it. The story gained mainstream media attention in France and led to hundreds joining in the treasure hunt. A week later, blockchain engineer Antoine Ferron found the painting and painstakingly cracked the clues to land the booty. The method by which Ferron untangled the series of clues is quite extraordinary and just shows the thought that went into the hiding process.
Bitcoin, the Artist’s Muse
Whether it’s to push a political message, reward intrepid detectives, or simply a fun way to give away some crypto. It seems that artists of all backgrounds and mediums are using Bitcoin to inspire them, just as it has inspired those in more technology-driven fields over the past ten years.
