What is HuntingSats?

The hunt for orange January is on, as Wasabi wallet and 12 other partners launch HuntingSats – a bona fide treasure hunt which challenges bitcoiners from all around the world to chase the words which make up the BIP 39 seedphrase and its corresponding passphrase.

How does this treasure hunt work? Well, it’s a little bit like Dragon Ball Z… except that there are 13 elements (12-word seed phrase + passphrase that’s also part of the BIP39 dictionary) instead of 7, you have to figure out the right order by yourself, and instead of having a dragon show up to grant you a wish there’s a bounty of 0.041 BTC to fulfil your Lambo dreams yourself.

Who are the 13 projects and companies that publish the words? In no particular order, you have to stalk the Twitter pages of CryptoSteel, Trezor, BTCPay, Blockstream, Bull Bitcoin, Bitcoin Reserve, Coinkite, Hodl Hodl, Mempool, Swan, Wizardsardine, Wasabi Wallet, and of course Bitcoin Takeover. All of them have received a box containing a CryptoSteel Capsule which encloses the secret word, and they’re supposed to reveal it in the coming days.

Where can you find the 13 words? If you really want to be ahead of everyone else in the race, then you should follow the official Twitter accounts of all projects involved. Here are the links: CryptoSteel, Trezor, BTCPay, Blockstream, Bull Bitcoin, Bitcoin Reserve, Coinkite, Hodl Hodl, Mempool, Swan, Wizardsardine, Wasabi Wallet, Bitcoin Takeover.

However, if you want to find an updated list of the words that have already been published then you can return to this article, or else go to the official HuntingSats page.

Which words have already been published? Blast, hollow, state, monkey, elder, present, Horse, Argue, Profit, Timber

Can you donate bitcoin to the HuntingSats address? Sure, that will only make the competition fiercer and more interesting. The higher the stakes, the more attractive the contest becomes.

What is the order of the words? That’s up to you to figure out. Just remember that one of them is the passphrase. Also, remember that your chances to grab the bitcoins increase exponentially each time a new word gets published.

Are there any tools to brute force this? In total, there are more than 479 million combinations (12 factorial plus the passphrase). Of course, not all of them will complete the checksum. So unless you’re very good at math and prefer to do everything on pen and paper, it’s probably a good idea to try an open source brute forcing software such as BTCRecover and SeedSavior. The former will try out all the combinations, while the latter will try to guess the missing words (assuming that you get the order right, which is rather improbable).

After all words have been published, it’s only a matter of hours until somebody brute forces the correct combination and transfers the bitcoin to his own wallet.

Learn more about the project by visiting huntingsats.com and search for clues by following the #huntingsats hashtag on Twitter. There’s also a Twitter Spaces call on Friday, January 26th, 8 PM CET to which you are invited.

Last but not least, I would like to thank Rafe and Thibaut for inviting Bitcoin Takeover to join the project. It’s truly an honor for BTCTKVR to be a part of this movement, but 1 bitcoin still equals 1 million bits and bitcents are a better name for sats. You’re not really HuntingSats unless you make them extinct, right?