Your Bitcoins Are In The Painting

An art-world niche means money for puzzlesolvers and startup funding for one creator.

- Olga Kharif

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.