The Riddle
in 2055, a bitcoiner known by the nym OrangeEyes died.
A day later a scheduled post went live on his Nostr account.
“Look for my return in twenty-one years.”
Outside of a small community of Bitcoin historians, OrangeEyes was nobody. He posted about bitcoin and gaming, and the occasional quote attributed to his late wife.
The week following, his cryptic post was filled with rumors and dead-
end chases. “Return how? Is he actually dead? Maybe this is one of his games. Someone should check the hospital records.” A year later, his post was a distant memory.
Then, twenty-one years after his death, on the 14th of April 2076,
another message appeared:
“Solid lines of code
Broken in parts told
Of my return seen
Only by those between”
Tony was shuttle-bound planetside after a double shift sorting debris on orbital station 42, located between the moon and Earth. Five sats an hour was great, especially when he got overtime. But work was work, and every hour he was unable to see his wife and daughter was an hour too long. Only thirteen more months and he would have enough saved to do what he truly loved, spend time with his girls and train horses on their small property in northern Arizona. Being able to retire at 30 was unthinkable to previous generations. Now it was rare for people to work past 40, thanks to the advent of deflation brought about by global acceptance of bitcoin.
Back home at his Austin, Texas, apartment, he was showering and reaching his hand through the water when the answer struck him. He ran out of the bathroom, threw on shorts and a t-shirt, not bothering to dry off, and headed downtown.
The statue of Satoshi showed a hooded figure sitting cross-legged with a laptop. It was made from lines of steel, broken by gaps.
“Solid lines … broken in parts.”
“Alright,” Tony said to himself. “How do I see your return?”
He looked through the statue at the city skyline. Maybe he needed to orient himself so that the statue covered certain parts of the world and revealed a message. He stood in every position he could manage. If there was a clue, he wasn’t seeing it.
He donned his AR glasses to ask an AI for assistance. The world was cast in amber, and a man materialized on the other side of the statue with his back turned. Tony walked around to the statue’s front, and in doing so the vision of OrangeEyes rotated.
“Twenty-one years is both a long time, and no time at all,” he said.
“How long did it take you to find me?”
“Half a day.”
OrangeEyes nodded.
“Not bad.”
“Why did you do this?”
OrangeEyes grinned.
“When my wife died she made
me promise to help others.
That, and I was inspired by a book I liked as a kid. Solve two more riddles and I’ll send you a bitcoin.”
Tony’s head spun, his knees turned to sun-softened glue, his eyes watered, and his stomach dropped. Only nation states had that kind of money.
“How about it?” OrangeEyes asked.
Tony heard himself say:
“Yeah, sure, okay.”
OrangeEyes said he would send him the next riddle the following day and Tony headed home in a daze.
Back home, he gulped water and tried to wrap his head around the idea of having a whole bitcoin. He may as well have tried to pluck the moon out of the sky. When he awoke, a message was waiting for him.
“Blue turns you on
Jan’s rising song
A name, is a solid fact
For one hundred million sats”
Tony paced. He ran the riddle through AIs, asked a couple of friends and his wife (without telling them the reason), and put each line of the riddle into search engines. An AI suggested the first line could be a reference to the band Blue Oyster Cult, because of oyster’s properties as an aphrodisiac. The rest fell into place soon after and Tony sent OrangeEyes his answer: “Godzilla.”
“That’s your guess?”
“If I get it wrong,
do I get a second chance?”
“No.”
Tony shrugged.
“Yeah, that’s my guess.”
No response came. Seconds passed. Tony’s heart raced. A minute passed, and it raced right off a cliff. After five minutes, OrangeEyes sent a reply.
“Well done. Here’s riddle number three.”
Before it came, Tony asked:
“You’re serious?
That was the answer?
Why did you wait so long?”
“I thought it would be fun. Ready for the last one?”
“Sure,” said Tony.
“What’s in my pocket?”
“That’s not a riddle.”
“Is that your answer?”
“No,” Tony replied.
“Can we talk? Face-to-face?”
OrangeEyes responded with a link.
Tony opened it and OrangeEyes’ masked avatar appeared in the center of his room.
“How could I possibly know
what’s in your pocket? It’s just … I have to take a blind guess?”
“It’s my game. My rules. I’ll give you three guesses for this one, since it’s unconventional.”
“It’s crap, not unconventional,” Tony said.
OrangeEyes smiled and shrugged.
“Then it’s my crap riddle.
Three guesses.”
“Nothing. Guess one,” Tony said.
“You don’t have anything in your pockets because you don’t even
have pockets.”
“Wrong.”
“This is impossible. At least the others had clues. I figured out the second one because of my Bitcoin meme history classes—Back and Mow always talking about Godzilla candles—but how am I supposed to figure this one out?”
“There are clues,
if you know where to look,”
OrangeEyes said, turning a circle.
“How can I be sure you won’t change your mind? You might have multiple things in there.”
“Two reasons.”
OrangeEyes pulled a slip of paper out of the air. A pen followed. He wrote something, folded the paper twice, and set it on the ground.
“The answer is there. If you open it before you give me your next guesses, you lose. But you can open it after, to be sure I wasn’t lying.”
“What’s the other reason?”
“I want to give my bitcoin away.
As I said before, it’s my way of
fulfilling my promise to my wife.”
Tony paced.
“You have five minutes.”
“I have a time limit?”
“My game, my rules.”
Tony sat and pressed his fingers into his forehead. He smirked.
“Data—or information.”
“That’s really two guesses, but I’ll be generous and only count it once. And no.”
“Oh give me a break,” Tony said.
“That’s technically true.”
OrangeEyes crossed his arms.
“Your game, your rules,” Tony said, scanning his belongings. His clothes, table, power cords, his books. Think man, think. If only he’d spent less time reading sci-fi and fantasy. What good had that ever done… His eyes came to rest on one of his favorites.
“Ring.” Tony said, his eyes lingering on the spine of The Hobbit. “You have a ring in your pocket.”
OrangeEyes turned a ring between his fingers, a melancholy smile on his face.
“Have any idea what you’ll do with a whole bitcoin?”
“Buy a few thousand acres,” Tony said, bending down to pick up the folded piece of paper. He read it and smiled. “Something for my children’s children, and their families.”
The paper said:
“Wedding ring.”
SUBSCRIBE TO THE BITCOIN ART MAGAZINE NEWSLETTER