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by kryogen1c 2625 days ago
My immediate reaction to satoshis treasure hunt is that it feels like a scam. Is drumming up more interest in bitcoin enough of a goal?

I don't buy that someone spent a million dollars (plus invested time to make the game) for fun with no way to make money back.

2 comments

> Is drumming up more interest in bitcoin enough of a goal?

If you have many millions of dollars in bitcoin, or are a consortium that does, how do you remove any sizable chunk of that money without tanking the market? One way might be to get people interested, and wanting to buy bitcoins, which allows bitcoins to be liquidated easier without affecting the market.

Does this accomplish that, and how large does the amount of money that needs to be moved need to be before wasting one million worth of it to manipulate the market with no guaranteed payout becomes worth it? I have no idea. It's a fun story though, and ultimately, that's what bitcoin is best at. Providing interesting stories.

How does a CEO of a company turn their stock into a bunch of cash without tanking their stock price? Selling after a bad quarter makes it look like things are dire. If you can't perform well, make everyone think you are going to perform well. Anyone that wants to make a profit off of bitcoin needs to hype it up as much as possible
By announcing their intention to sell well in advance of making the trade [0]

[0] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/rule-10b5-1.asp

Bitcoin has a $12 billion volume in just the last 24 hours. You will need to sell off quite a few million very quickly to have any significant impact on the market, even when considering the fact that much of it is being wash traded.
> Bitcoin has a $12 billion volume in just the last 24 hours.

According to whose numbers?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/most-bitcoin-trading-faked-by-u...

How much of that are real transactions and not just miners trading with each other?
I wouldn't consider it a scam unless the puzzle is determined to be unsolvable or they fail to pay out the winner. Websites run contests all the time, and there are multiple ways to monetize a contest like this. For example, this will generate traffic and links to the domain which should increase resale value.