Your Bitcoins Are Hidden in the Painting
Your Bitcoins Are Waiting in the Painting, If You Can Find Them
Marguerite deCourcelle lives at the peculiar intersection of  Bitcoin and art. Under the pseudonym @coin_artist, she’s credited with inventing the crypto-art puzzle, a genre of images hiding complicated ciphers that reward the first solver with a walletful of virtual currency. The most famous of these is an @coin_artist oil pastel from 2015 called Torched H34R7S, the final work in a series known as The Legend of Satoshi Nakamoto. Depicting a ­turtledove, chess pieces, and a ­phoenix surrounded by flames, the painting incorporates symbolic references to Bitcoin’s creator, as well as to Shakespeare and deCourcelle’s personal life. An anonymous person solved the riddle in 2018, unlocking 5 Bitcoins, at the time worth about $50,000.DeCourcelle started the Bitcoin-art-puzzle phenomenon in 2014 with  Dark Wallet Puzzle, a painting of two leading crypto anarchists that hides a key. It led to a 3.4-Bitcoin reward. “I created it after realizing that without a third party litigating how money moves, that money could be ‘pulled out’ of anything,” she says.