In 2015, @coin_artist collaborated with @rheaplex on a painting that concealed access to a bitcoin wallet.
The bitcoin wasn't physically embedded in the work. Instead, Myers devised a system for encoding wallet access into the painting itself. Coin Artist then rendered that code as rows of flames surrounding the image, with colours, shapes and lengths representing binary data that could ultimately be deciphered to reveal the private key.
TORCHED H34R7S was the final stage of The Legend of Satoshi Nakamoto, an elaborate puzzle series that began in 2014. Inspired in part by Shakespeare's The Phoenix and the Turtle, the painting draws on the poem's imagery of love, death and the phoenix.
Before releasing the painting, Coin Artist loaded its wallet with 4.87 bitcoin, around half her total assets at the time. The puzzle went unsolved for nearly three years, and as bitcoin's value climbed, so did the prize. An online community gathered to share theories and work their way through a set of clues drawing on cryptography, bitcoin, games and internet culture.
When the puzzle was finally solved in early 2018, the prize had grown from its original value of $1,400 to nearly $50,000. The wallet was drained, but the painting remained: a work of cryptoart whose private key had been hiding in plain sight.