How to set up a treasure map?

[shamoons]

If I were to send 1 BTC to some address, all one would need to steal that money is the corresponding private key. Since a private key is nothing more than a 256-bit number, I was thinking about making a treasure map of sorts.

Code:

E9 87 3D 79 C6 D8 7D C0 FB 6A 57 78 63 33 89 F4 45 32 13 30 3D A6 1F 20 BD 67 FC 23 3A A3 32 62

for example, is a private key. So what sort of treasure hunt can I create that will make it possible for someone to discover the private key and therefore win the bounty?

I'm imagining a series of clues (think National Treasure), but not too obvious. If it's to be a world-wide hunt, it must therefore be difficult to crack. I don't want to hide the private key on a website or anything, but rather have the pieces be freely found in the public. So perhaps

Code:

E9

could represent the 233rd page of some book and so on.

Would love feedback and ideas.

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[coinslut]

Kinda cool, make it extremely challenging though or someone will get it too quickly. Might want to look into "A Treasure's Trove" and books of that sort for the basics. Also 1 btc seems low for a worldwide hunt, but I guess for some it isn't about the money but the thrill of solving the puzzles.

[grue]

have you considered using Shamir's Secret Sharing so a person with enough pieces can't bruteforce the rest?

[shamoons]

Kinda cool, make it extremely challenging though or someone will get it too quickly. Might want to look into "A Treasure's Trove" and books of that sort for the basics. Also 1 btc seems low for a worldwide hunt, but I guess for some it isn't about the money but the thrill of solving the puzzles.

Thats the question... How do I make it challenging? And the prize would probably be 1,000 bitcoins

[Taras]

1,000 bitcoins? That's enough to feed 70,000 people for a week.

[shamoons]

1,000 bitcoins? That's enough to feed 70,000 people for a week.

I guess I'm asking more for ideas on how to construct the treasure map rather than how much the bounty should be.

[MatthewLM]

have you considered using Shamir's Secret Sharing so a person with enough pieces can't bruteforce the rest?

A simple way is that maybe the private key could be derived by a hash of many pieces of data, where each are long enough so that you would need all of them to practically compute the private key. And then you could have arbitrary amounts of data as well.

Also the clues could be clues to find the next clue, which ends by finding the entire private key.

[shamoons]

have you considered using Shamir's Secret Sharing so a person with enough pieces can't bruteforce the rest?

A simple way is that maybe the private key could be derived by a hash of many pieces of data, where each are long enough so that you would need all of them to practically compute the private key. And then you could have arbitrary amounts of data as well.

Also the clues could be clues to find the next clue, which ends by finding the entire private key.

That's interesting. So the first clue would be something like "Who is John Galt?", the answer to which might be "The man who stopped the motor of the world." And if you concatenate those strings, SHA256 it, there's your private key. Something like that?

[Noitev]

have you considered using Shamir's Secret Sharing so a person with enough pieces can't bruteforce the rest?

A simple way is that maybe the private key could be derived by a hash of many pieces of data, where each are long enough so that you would need all of them to practically compute the private key. And then you could have arbitrary amounts of data as well.

Also the clues could be clues to find the next clue, which ends by finding the entire private key.

That's interesting. So the first clue would be something like "Who is John Galt?", the answer to which might be "The man who stopped the motor of the world." And if you concatenate those strings, SHA256 it, there's your private key. Something like that?

Yeah, or you can do what a few others have and just build a brainwallet string of words/ sentence.

[shamoons]

So how do I make it extremely challenging, but not impossible? If the bounty is large, presumably a lot of people would try to solve it. It can't be simple questions and answers.

[phirex]

just an idea i have
take a picture of a wall in some parking lot preferably with some graffiti on it, and the parking spot above it "2D" will be one of the strings..
you could then hint with the city it was taken ....
that's of course not fair for everyone who lives far or in a different country...

[Dabs]

If it's a treasure map, you want people to actually go to the first physical location, then get a clue for the next location.

If you're not making odd riddles, you could simplify it by just putting GPS coordinates, sort of like geocaching.

[shamoons]

just an idea i have
take a picture of a wall in some parking lot preferably with some graffiti on it, and the parking spot above it "2D" will be one of the strings..
you could then hint with the city it was taken ....
that's of course not fair for everyone who lives far or in a different country...

That's actually a pretty great idea!

[Elwar]

One clue could include geocaching...where you place the clue somewhere and provide hints on how to get there.

[Buffer Overflow]

1,000 bitcoins? That's enough to feed 70,000 people for a week.

  The Bitcoins aren't destroyed after being spent.

[shamoons]

Any other ideas on this?

[rarkenin]

One clue could include geocaching...where you place the clue somewhere and provide hints on how to get there.

That's too preferential for a given geographic region--good for a close group of friends or a town council, not for the bitcoin community. Or are you speaking of an online "cache" of sorts?

[shamoons]

Either, both. Local cache, online treasure map - whatever.

[Kouye]

What exactly do you mean by a treasure map?
A riddle book such as https://store.mcsweeneys.net/products/the-clock-without-a-face?

My advice would be to make a first attempt at a national one, and craft a real treasure hunt pointing to a location where the private key is buried. This will solve both the brute-force issue raised by grue and the riddle=>private key conversion.

[StarfishPrime]

Any other ideas on this?

Instead of using hexadecimal fragments parts of the actual private key, you could use a bunch of words, numbers, phrases, etc strung together as a password for an encrypted key (using the BIP38 encrytion available for many paper wallets).

You could also have a sequence of 'prizes' that could only be claimed in sequence since a portion of previous key could also be used as part of the passphrase to the next one:

password = "test 1234 word 5A23d ..."  etc

edit: Someone already suggested using a 'brain wallet' phrase, but BIP38 would be significantly more resistant to password cracking attempts.