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by ibgames

EARTHDATE: April 15, 2018

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REAL LIFE NEWS: ARTIST MAKES ART THAT HIDES CODE TO CRYPTOCURRENCIES

by Hazed

An artist has brought together the fields of cryptocurrency and art to create pictures from Lego bricks that hide the key to crypto-wallets. Anyone who can decipher the key can grab that digital cash.

Andy Bauch started to dabble in cryptocurrencies in 2013. He is an enthusiast but wouldn’t describe himself as a “rabid promoter”. A few years ago he began to experiment with merging his interest in Bitcoin with his artwork.

The pictures in his new exhibition, on show at LA’s Castelli Art Space, are each “a secret key to various types of cryptocurrency.” He bought various amounts of Bitcoin and other altcoins in 2016 and stashed them in different digital wallets, each of which is encrypted with a private key (a string of letters and numbers).

He fed the keys through an algorithm which generated a pattern, then tweaked the algo until it produced an image that appealed to him. Having used the pattern to create his artworks he tested them rigorously to make sure that they can be reversed to give the private keys.

The artwork is on sale for collectors, but any viewers can try to crack the private key. Purchasers, however, will be given a hint that may help them to retrieve the digital money.

Hopefully the wallets won’t have been hacked before people get to them!

Source: https://gizmodo.com/artist-hides-secret-code-to-10-000-worth-of-cryptocurr-1824030024

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