Bitcoin investor hides 2 million dollars in 5 Treasure Chests

A Web3 enthusiast might say those words about blockchain smart contracts.

John Collins-Black, a A lifelong fan of fantasy novels and games, he leveraged a portion of his Bitcoin investments, worth an average BTC value of $2 million today. To fill five treasure chests hidden throughout the United States.

Millionaire Bitcoin investor hides crypto rewards on the map

An early Bitcoin-era cryptocurrency investor went to auctions to create a unique collection of loot. What's more, he said, the treasure chests contained rare Pokemon cards, historic shipwrecks, sports memorabilia, and gold and precious metals.

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

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

That hunt is for a single wheel that contains gold bars, rare metal coins and precious jewels and precious stones.

How does Fen treasure hunting compare to Bitcoin mining/or buying BTC for a risk-reward profile?

Any lucky treasure hunters who successfully find one of the treasure chests may come away with a cash windfall. That is, if you don't overspend them to get the loot you find.

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

Do the math

His book is now available in hardcover on Amazon starting November 2024 for $47.44. But for Collins-Black, it's the time and energy spent hunting for treasure that really costs many hunters.

It wasn't until 2020 that a treasure hunter solved the hunt and found the treasure of Forest Fen. In the ten years since Fenn began his career, there have been many unsuccessful attempts to win the gold and other prizes. From 2016 to 2020, five people died in freak accidents while searching for Fen's treasure.

A treasure hunt of this nature is very interesting for the blockchain sector because it works exactly like the Bitcoin core protocol that monetizes and manages transaction orders on the network.

In order to leverage electricity costs into a publicly verifiable general decentralized ledger state, Bitcoin requires BTC mining computers to guess a random number by verifying the guesses with the SHA-256 hashing algorithm.

Just like treasure hunters, only one will find the correct number and win the Bitcoin prize. But when it works, the miner can use that reward to lower electricity costs and usually earn a surplus to keep.

If electricity costs $0.05 per kilowatt, at the current mining hash rate of 390 Terahash per second – $8.66 running electricity through a Bitcoin miner would yield an average mining revenue of $22.48, according to data from CoinWarz available on Tuesday, December 3rd. 59% marginal return for each unit of electricity.