Bitcoin Forum

Coming soon. A new game site. Here's a description:

This site introduces the hobby of treasure and scavenger hunting to the global community. The site is arranged by subjects of interest in order to create labyrinths of exciting puzzles, quests, and learning. [link removed] edit: The link is at the end.

Buried Keys is a website introducing the hobby of exploring and digging for buried online treasure. The site is arranged by subjects of interest in order to create labyrinths of exciting puzzles, quests, and learning that suits your interests. You will begin each new adventure by going to the Topic you are interested in and choosing a Dig. New Digs will have unclaimed treasure keys. Each Dig question reveals a part of the key to the buried treasure. You may compete with other treasure hunters for the keys or you may visit older Digs that may no longer have prizes, but are still fun! The Topics, Digs, keys, and rewards are solely at the discretion of the site owner. There is no fee for participation. Each Dig is a winner-take-all contest. There are no guarantees of any rewards since others are competing with you, but that never stopped true treasure hunters!

Prizes
The rewards for playing Buried Keys are the keys to unlock a cryptographic treasure in the form of Bitcoin. These Bitcoin can be stored in your own treasure chest or spent to buy things at many online sites. It is recommended that you familiarize yourself with Bitcoin and how to create a wallet. There are many programs you may download as source code that you can compile yourself or you may simply trust the program providers and download them to use right away. There are also several online wallets that can be used, but it is not advisable to store very much at one time nor any for very long. They are available as many computer and smartphone versions, and they should all work pretty well for this website.

Once you complete all the digs for each buried key, you will enter them in order into a specialized key generator of that series of words. The public part of the key must match the public key presented on the dig page. The private key will then be entered by you importing it into your Bitcoin program, app, or online wallet. You will then, as soon as you are able to, spend that amount to a secure Bitcoin address. After the Bitcoin is sent to your own private address, it is advisable to delete the address imported by you or else someone else may solve the dig after you and get a copy of the keys for themselves and steal your treasure out from under your nose! It is also possible that you may get the keys yourself right after someone else and they are already spent. This is all about competition.

This process is somewhat complex at the moment. If you are not familiar with how Bitcoin works, it is advisable to get assistance from someone that has expertice with Bitcoin.

Once you have all the answers that you think are correct, it's time to get your Bitcoin.

Get Bitcoin
It would be a good idea to get to understand this process before playing Buried Keys competitively. This is a multi-step process for now, but soon it should be much simpler. These step-by-step instructions should suffice in the meantime. First of all, you will need to have all your Dig questions in order. You will then need a way to type all of them into a special kind of Private Key generator. There are several. One of the easiest is to use BitAddress. This is a Java program that can even run offline if you want to disconnect from the internet to use it. You will then go to the Wallet Details tab and type in (or copy/paste) each word in your answers with one space between them into the Enter Private Key box. They are case sensitive and can only be letters and numbers. Example: altimeter vegetarian chocolate periwinkle Yosemite juniper Jupiter George Washington

By pressing the View Details button and then OK you would get a Bitcoin Address (it starts with a 1) that should match the Bitcoin Address with the Dig. In this case the Bitcoin Address is 1thRWQZVUqBFcyGhBkHM2nS29e5Sj7gb1 along with a corresponding QR code. If that matches the Bitcoin Address for the Dig, then you look for the Private Key (starts with a 5 and is base58). In this case it is 5KSxXCvfEjujLKCya8H7YHepGCBiWmiU6cvkkfH7W4H16VvGApd.

Once you have your Private Key, you can then unlock the treasure, but you will need to use it quickly before someone else also finds the key and removes the treasure before you do!

Once you have your Private Key, there are several ways to redeem it for Bitcoin. Probably the easiest is to use an online wallet. It is not recommended to use online wallets for large amounts. The reason is that you are storing money on someone's server that offers no insurance against loss from accident or theft. For Buried Keys, they should be fine for short term storage. The first one recommended is MtGox. You will need to set up an account that requires only a username, password, and a valid email address. Once your account is active there is a section where you can import your Private Key and acquire Bitcoin. MtGox will automatically secure your imported Bitcoin so you don't have to worry about someone stealing it.

Another online wallet is My Wallet where you can then go into the import section (after acknowledging that it is an advanced feature) and import your Private Key. Once the address is verified after up to a, you will need to send the Bitcoin from that address to another address. Either send it to another one on My Wallet or anywhere else that has a secure address for which no one else has a key. You will then need to click the far right archive button next to your newly imported key.

There are also downloadable Bitcoin clients for computers and smartphones that have much of this functionality too. Once you have your Bitcoin, these are also great ways to start spending Bitcoin!
http://sites.google.com/site/buriedkeys/ (http://sites.google.com/site/buriedkeys/)

Do I have to log in to google sites to use it? is there any way to use it without logging in? I clicked the link and it asked me to log in.

It's not quite yet ready for launch. I will unlock it what it's ready. I suppose I should remove the link forwarding for now. Thanks.

Heh, yeah... let's take down that link until it's ready.  Looking forward to checking it out though!

Buried Keys is a neat sounding ida cbeast

Buried Keys (https://www.buriedkeys.com) is now live! It is a rudimentary version, but ideas are welcome.

https://www.buriedkeys.com sits and times out
http://www.buriedkeys.com sucessfully redirects to https://sites.google.com/site/buriedkeys/

might want to look into that or fix your post link.

I might also suggest a brain-dead bulletpoint guide as to what to do. All I can figure from my brief overview of the site (which is what most people will probably do) was that there are a list of questions that I need to answer, but I can't really tell what to do with the answers... the 'How to Play' section needs to be explained more clearly and not as a big blob of text. Especially, it doesn't seem to explain what to do with your answers to each part of the dig.

But aside from that, cool idea. If you could facilitate 'user generated digs' that would be awesome.

edit:
ok it's explained by the link on 'buried treasure'. I might suggest making that a bit more explicit and also including it as part of the 'how to play' section.

Poke.

Thanks. I am working with a Swedish youtube veteran who will be explaining the game in a short video. I will add graphics to the video to make it clearer. She should make the game more interesting. As far as the game being a list of questions, yeah that's all the skills I have for now.  I have ideas for other sorts of games with the same "buried keys" theme. This has a lot of evolving to do.

Borrowed a friend's bible :)

Task 1 begin!

Good luck! I hope I did not make these too easy. I'll be working on some more this weekend. I have a fb page at https://www.facebook.com/BuriedKeys if anyone like this.

I'm trying to figure out how to fund this with ads. When I get enough content, I may go with content based links, but if it ever gets popular I would eventually prefer sponsorship for the Digs.

I have added a crossword puzzle in the Crossword Gold section. I hope it is not too easy. Good luck!

It is impossible because it is subject to interpretation (or arcane knowledge and wording that only you can know the answer to). I just tried to add my generated key for the Bible 1a ones, after being properly encoded to base58 starting with a '5', without success. You'd be better off providing an ISBN of a NY Times best seller, and listing page, line, and word to search for, which would only require basic counting, not mind-reading.

The answers may be a little tricky, but they make sense. They are spelled as they appear in KJV 1611. Buried keys is intended to be a team game if/when the project gets finished and sponsors are found. It was inspired by http://90fmtrivia.org/ (http://90fmtrivia.org/).

Subbing, like the idea of answering trivia and puzzles for bitcoin...

Just tried using a KJV 1611 word search and it's not showing me where you got the questions from. I only had a chance looking at other versions. You shouldn't have to hold a doctorate in theology or discuss this amongst your group at a monastery or convent...

The rules don't say that that the questions must come from KJV 1611, only the answers do. Search engines probably won't help much, but a doctorate in theology might. There are other puzzles on the website that are not bible related. I hope to have more in the near future as the site develops. Thanks for playing!

Do the answers comprise a private key somehow? Or do they just need to be submitted to you to be verified as accurate?
EDIT: I just re-read the OP, so I guess the answers do need to make a private key. Beats me where to get started though.

For the Bible section, a little Googling and theological know-how has gotten me about 10 answers that I am fairly certain are correct, 3 more that are uncertain, and 2 that I have not yet figured out.

On the Bible dig: I've got a collection of possible answers and some pretty solid references to back them up, but can't seem to find the key.  If anyone else who is close would like to pool answers and see if we can solve it together, that might be interesting (assuming cbeast is OK with it.)

Although I'll trust anyone, I'm curious if there's some cool crypto we can use to share answers without having the completely trust each other...

Kudos on the site.  It has the potential to introduce a lot of new people to bitcoins.

I have a couple of suggestions.

No matter how creative you are, you will eventually run out of puzzles.  I suggest you set it up so that users can submit their own puzzles (become puzzle masters).  Encourage users to donate to the prize money and to tip the puzzle masters. Maybe have a minimum prize before you are willing to post a puzzle submission, and when the prize is taken, you would take the puzzle down, or move it to the completed puzzles section. Incorporate a leader board for the puzzle masters, so that people that submit really hard puzzles get recognition.

Another handy tool would be to incorporate the bitaddress.org and blockexplorer functionality into the site, so people don't have to leave the page to check their answers or see the prize total. 

Nice job and best of luck!

Thank you on the kind words. I have a pretty good vision of what I want the site to look like, how it will function, and how to make it grow and scale. I have been thinking of starting a GLBSE to raise funds to hire programmers. In the meantime, I can make more puzzles and find more ideas.

I don't think it is going to require a lot of coding at first, so I will probably just hire someone out of pocket for the initial development so it will spark interest from investors. I would even entertain a partnership in GLBSE stock.

For those folks playing, I encourage teamwork and using technology. This is not the kind of contest that can be won by just googling stuff. Expert knowledge is sometimes needed, but cleverness is almost always required. There are a lot of trick questions. Read them carefully and interpret them in ways not always included in some dictionary or thesaurus, but by other usages as well. I'll need to put that hint on the site.

I am interested in helping build the site.  I can't commit a lot of time to it, but if you've got some smaller ideas you'd like to implement soon I'd love to be involved!  My main environments right now are PHP and Javascript, but I could pick up something else.

That's great. I'm not really familiar with PHP and Javascript, but they should do fine. The games are pretty simple. The crossword puzzles I want to be able to run locally offline (for security reasons) and enter the words into the boxes or onto a line that automatically inputs them into the boxes. Right now I'm using a puzzle generator that is not useful for this but there are free Javascript puzzle generators available online that would be worth using as a template to build an interactive one. There will then need to be a solution button that concatenates the words into a string to be copy/pasted into a brainwallet app to see if it matches the given solution.

The Digs can be just entered as strings with each question and then again concatenated into a string for a brainwallet app. It would also be nice if the work in progress can be saved offline on a local drive for the individual to come back to.

I also want a forum for teams to privately or openly discuss questions.

These are just basic functions needed for now. I have a lot more plans.

I am willing to pay some for this, but I need to find another funding source eventually. Msg me privately if you (or anyone) are interested.

Am I doing it right http://tinyurl.com/geobtc ? Not sure it uses spaces, the description is vague it might be \n or something.
Some ppl tried to bruteforce it using http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/allCountries.zip (1GB unzipped) didn't get anything.
If someone will manage to solve it, please report here for gods sake.

Good work so far, not too many wrong! Here's the thing: I know it's hard. This site (when it is developed) is intended to be world-class hard and not to be completed by an individual. I will go over your answers to see if there is something I can learn about the problem solving process. I do appreciate and applaud your efforts! This will help me make this a better site.

Let me tell you a little about the inspiration for this site. For awhile I lived in Stevens Point, WI and enjoyed playing in the World's largest trivia contest. It was and still is played on the college radio station as a 54 hour marathon of trivia, music, and madness. Teams would call in answers and earn points. They would also engage in scavenger hunt activities presumably to get out and get some fresh air.

Team members became life-long friends and many made trivia their obsession. Some super-teams would take turns all year-long going to every film played locally, scanning books (before Google), and allegedly even followed The Oz (as he is called, I won't divulge his identity) on summer vacations to see what he enjoyed.

I tell this story to provide a background into the spirit of what trivia is about to me.

I am re-visioning Buried Keys to add an interactive online game show. It will be more of a party atmosphere. The puzzles will not be easier, but there will be hints and other fun things in store. I want to make this into a contest to win bitcoins based on small entry fees. I'm hoping there will be interest in this concept. There will be more details soon.

I will just say this:

1 ACROSS = SARANGANI
2 DOWN = ...

now leave you all to get started

This is fun.  I see that the Bible Dig hasn't been claimed yet, so I'm working on that one at the moment.  I've got 10 answers (probably the 10 easiest ones), there are a 2 more that I expect to be able to find eventually.  Then there are 3 that I know I'm going to struggle with.

I was notified that question 9 in the Bible dig is poorly structured. In this case, I will agree to rewrite the question in (hopefully) proper English.

It worked fine for me.  I'm pretty sure I managed to find the correct answer. If you really feel a need to rewrite it, I'll take another look afterward to see if I still get the same answer, but I doubt it is necessary.

The 5 questions that I'm still working on in that dig are 3, 4, 8, 11, and 14.

AHHH!!! I can't believe I missed this. My instructions are incomplete. When I said that modern spelling will be used, I meant only the questions, not the answers. The answers are as they appear in KJV 1611. I hope this did not throw anyone off. I will correct the intructions in bold.

I had already figured that out and was hoping that the only reason the bitcoins weren't claimed yet was that maybe I was the only one who figured it out.  I suspect that others who have all the answers will quickly claim the reward now.  We'll see.

I'm not so sure. Not all the questions have easy answers. There are trick questions. These are meant to be solved through discussion by teams.

Hi folks,
I've finally been let out of newbie "heaven".

I am interested in collaborating with others on this quiz (and obviously sharing the prize). If you PM me, I'll be more forthcoming about my answers, but here I will post the sha256 hash of my answers so far, so that we can compare. These are the answers to the Bible dig. I am using lowercase spellings for everything that I have. All answers contain only letters (even the one that asks for the number of horns). All answers are one-word, except for 12, for which I've included two possibilities.



These hashes are just the sha256 hash of the answers. They can be computed in one of several ways:

1. On bitaddress.org, paste into the address bar, substitute "answer" with your own word and hit enter. The popup will contain the hash.

2. In node.js use
3. On unix/linux type the following in the command line:
For testing purposes, the sha256 of "answer" is 0db52f4076c082518412afd3dd3576e2cb0c63703fd7fed5e23ade60efef31d9

For anyone else doing the Bible quiz, where are you getting the 1611 text? I've tried the following two:
http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/1611-Bible/
http://av1611.com/kjbp/kjv-bible-text/

However, the spellings are not quite the same between the two. Sometimes a "u" is written as a "v" and sometimes a "v" as a "u". Other times, they're the same. In one, a word might have an "e" appended to the end, in another version, there is no "e'. It would take too much effort to go through all possible combinations. What do you guys think is the "official" 1611 version?

Regards,
53v3r

One of them is the KJV 1611 version and one is a modern translation. Lest it be clear for thou to knoweth the difference. There are other copies online as well. Make sure of your answers by checking multiple sources to be sure.

My answers differ from yours on numbers 3, 4, 12, 13, and 14.  On number 12 I found that we spelled the same answer differently (changed my spelling and then the hash matched).  That leaves 3, 4, 13, and 14 where we seem to have different answers.

Additionally I still don't have the answers yet for 8 or 11.

Shall we exchange answers (and reasoning) for 3, 4, and 13, and 14 to see which of us is mistaken?  Here are my hashes:

3. fa5cbdbe1d7afd7b7e5f80922010bd89b2b650b5d41cd6d32e856f40bd66cab8
   6d705d62c204d312f024c495e18a76043c041e4261441120c096adb8a6c93b64 (alternate spelling)

4. 0ddf0830b87790422913467b64c752fc1028bf83561a84af320f81b2d68c70b2

13. ad589ceb8b5ccca048911a0e4dcf5466a1f14dc9f50517c9a2c53988d7de2521

14. 0bb09d80600eec3eb9d7793a6f859bedde2a2d83899b70bd78e961ed674b32f4

Well I had come up with answers a while back but never got them to work out together and had basically given up on it.  So I just went back over my list and switched some 'u's and 'v's, added a few 'e's and out popped an answer.

Spoiler warning if you want to finish it yourself, couldn't find a style to black it out completely though:
carpenter cubite treasures pleasing delusion eleven fire boastings Dagon vnsearchable sharpe kniues pruning hookes dominion vapour perdition

Now if I could just figure out how to narrow down the answers in that crossword somewhat (I have found quite a few 6-letter places in Norway and towns in New Jersey with the right crossing letters)

Saw that one coming.  Congratulations.  I'll probably work on it for another day or two before I look at your answers.

Hi Danny, good effort. I wont be putting any more time into it. Sorry that you lost it bc of my post about u's and v's.



Nicely done, mskwik.

Congratulations! It gives me hope to continue this idea and make it better.

There are still two puzzles to be solved. Volunteers wanted to restyle the website. Interested parties PM me. I plan to completely redesign the game itself.

It seems these puzzles are too difficult to solve. This site will be redesigned in the near future. If the remaining puzzles are not solved by April 1, 2013, then the puzzles will be ended and the answers posted. The new design will be much different. I am still looking for a programmer to work with me. PM me if interested.

If anyone knows mskwik, please have him/her contact me.

If anyone has the address 1J2tddvD6hiw4Tm32C6DbmsQcxNsCxEjUm please contact me. I accidently added the bible answer private key to my active wallet and lost 45 BTC. If anyone has this address I ask you to pm me. Thanks.