Two days ago I read this article in „Klausis Krypto Kolumne“. It is about artist Andy Bauch, who created Lego mosaics with hidden data in it. Decoding the data should lead to private keys for crypto-currencies …

After a little brainstorming I managed to crack the code of the picture Bitcoin Initially Valued at $20, 2016, but when looking up the calculated Bitcoin Address (1NmxAV1ze28U4Uuqg2fH1JTB8NtWKvTyhM) in a Blockexplorer, I had to recognize, that the value was already withdrawn. After googling the decoded private key (S49JAsn794iqvr6sTodXfdf41NCFaD) I found an russian article on medium.com, explaining the decoding process of all the Bitcoin series. Further information I then found here.

So some clever guys had done it three weeks ago and collected Bitcoins worth USD 10.000,- Congratulations!

Parallel to the „Bitcoins“ series Andy Bauch also did some artwork including the private keys for other cryptocurrencies. For example Dogecoin initally valued at $10, 2018.

I played around with it yesterday evening: It is a little more complicated to extract the private key (than in the BTC series) and the gained value is far lower, but the fun is the same …

Here my findings for the Dogecoin picture, after locating the relevant area in the picture (see yellow frame):

The information is coded in Base4, using 4 digits per character
Colors: pink: 0, red: 1, blue: 2, grey: 3

This leads to following 204 digits: 031210221101101013020310101113120312030313101013100211131003031312220302102211211322101012321213121213021100112011201303122110111221101310311301121212231213111313031233101112320320031113111013031011200310

This sequence grouped in four digits, converted to Base10 and interpreted as ASCII gives the 51 character private key: 6JQDr4Ev63tGBWC7j2JYzDngfrPXXsiEiGMqfkgWsoEn85uG4X4

This converts to the DOGE Address: DS94PAd6nxxTWSktgHUKkcxxjotSJoWrCW

As expected, the 1,255.3030078 DOGE (valued approx. USD 10,-) also have been collected on 2018-03-24.

But: Did I mention the fun?

😉