Bitcoin investor hides $2 million in 5 treasure chests

A Web3 enthusiast might say these same words about a blockchain smart contract.

Jon Collins-Black, a lifelong fan of fantasy novels and games, has used some of his early Bitcoin investments, worth about $2 million at today’s average BTC price, to fill five treasure chests hidden in the United States.

Bitcoin millionaire investor hides crypto prizes on the map

The first cryptocurrency investor of the Bitcoin era went to auctions to create the unique collection of loot. It also says that treasure chests contain rare Pokémon cards, historic shipwreck artifacts, sports memorabilia, and gold and precious metals.

“I was like a kid in a candy store,” he said.

Collins-Black said she was inspired in part by the treasure hunt launched by veteran and eccentric art collector Forrest Fenn of the US Air Force. Like Collins-Black, the larger-than-life figure self-published a book to promote the treasure hunt in 2010, “The Thrill of the Chase: A Memoir.”

That hunt was for a single tessa and contained gold nuggets, rare metal coins and precious gems and gems.

How does Fenn’s treasure hunt compare to Bitcoin mining/or buying BTC for a risk-reward profile?

Any of the lucky treasure hunters who successfully find one of the treasure chests can come out on the money in terms of profits. That is, if they don’t overspend the value of the loot they find to locate it.

Think of it as the SETI formula for the probability of finding intelligent life on other planets.

Doing the Math

His book is available now in hardcover on Amazon from November 2024 for $47.44. But it’s the time and energy spent hunting down Collins-Black’s treasure that will really cost the bounty hunters.

It wasn’t until 2020 that a treasure hunter managed to solve the hunt and find Forrest Fenn’s treasure. In the ten years since Fenn launched it, there were many unsuccessful attempts to find the gold and other prizes. From 2016 to 2020, as many as five people died in freak accidents while reportedly searching for Fenn’s treasure.

A treasure hunt of this nature is a lot of fun for the blockchain industry because the way it works is very similar to the core Bitcoin protocol that secures money on the network and manages transaction orders.

In order to leverage the cost of electricity into the publicly verifiable state of a decentralized ledger of accounts, Bitcoin requires BTC mining computers to guess a random number by checking the guesses using the SHA-256 hash algorithm.

Just like treasure hunters, only one will find the correct number and win the Bitcoin reward. But when it does, the miner can use that reward to defray electricity costs and usually find a profit left over to keep.

Assuming electricity costs of $0.05 per kWh, at the current mining rate of 390 Terahashes per second, $8.66 of electricity through a Bitcoin miner will yield an average mining revenue of 22.48 dollars, according to CoinWarz data accessed on Tuesday, December 3. a marginal return on investment of 59% for each unit of electricity applied.

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