How to win the prize hidden in “Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains”

6 min readNov 12, 2018

Nov 7th, we posted a riddle which will trigger 4,000BTM and it attracted a lot community members to participate. Just like a spark, it spread widely in the community and there was a widespread discussion.

I’m not the riddle creator, but I’m curious about the difficult question and had no idea. Just like maybe someone of you，using magnifying glass to find it if there are details hidden in the picture. Some people also said，how can we solve this one，I don’t know Chinese phrase at all!

“Where is the question”

“Is that private key in Chinese or English”

“Brains are already boiling”

“I have made significant progress and have found what is hidden except I am stuck trying to guess password !!! must have more clue! Please give to me!
If anyone else wants to purchase my progress please respond !”

Finally “That One Canadian” Stands out from the crowd and took the prize home.BTW, he is also the moderator of Bytom Discord community.

Gregory mainly focuses on WordPress web design, that’s what he does for his main job. He has had clients ranging from fashion stores to tattoo parlors, even to action sports companies. He has been involved in cryptocurrency since close to the beginning of bitcoin, he heard about it and started messing around with mining on his pc back when pc mining bitcoin was possible. for a while he forgot about cryptocurrency and lost any coins he mined due to computer changes over the years. He got back into crypto in 2016 where he invested in Litecoin heavily and started renting machines to mine specific coins for profit. He has caught the crypto addiction once again. He began searching for different coins and communities and grew his interest around cryptocurrency which brought him to Bytom. Bytom peaked his interest in blockchain and saw great potential for the platform, he became an active user in their community and mine once Bytom main net started. In his spare time, he likes to do photography and work on small coding projects for discord communities.Gregory came across Bytom during his search for up and coming blockchain technology. He was very interested in Bytom’s approach to digitizing assets, he invested also in mining Bytom in order to be a part of the future of this currency. He believed strongly that Bytom will make big changes to the cryptocurrency world and remained an active member in Bytom Discord, When he heard about the global ambassador program, he immediately applied to Bytom program, with the intention of moderating the community discord and devote his time to making Bytom discord a better place for everyone.

Gregory’s background as a web designer has taught him anything, it is that behind that fancy webpage (or image in this case) there is a lot of text that makes it possible. so immediately he thought to look into the image source with a hex editor. hex editors basically took a file and broke it down into language that computers understand, and explains how to show the file to the user. at first, he did not find anything unusual with the images provided from Bytom, so his next idea was to download the same images from the museum’s website and used a hex program that can compare both Bytom’s image and museum’s image, and found differences. Once he did this, he noticed there were extra hex codes in Bytom’s image, which began with “rar”. Gregory copied the different code beginning with rar into a new file, and saved it as a rar file, and repeated the same process for the second image. This resulted in two rar files, once opened showed text files called “1” and “2” but they are password protected. This is where he got stuck for most of his time trying to solve this puzzle. He first wasted some time googling for an ability to bypass password in rar files but it was unsuccessful. Then he thought, the extra hex code from Bytom’s images that made the rar files was very short, which meant to him, the contents of the file were small, and the password was short,too.

Gregory started with guessing Bytom keywords like “Bytom” “BTM” etc. Then he remembered that Bytom posted a Wikipedia article to the story of the images, it must be for some other reason than just extra reading material. Knowing that the password had to be short, he read the article several times and tried picking out keywords to the artwork, and the author. Eventually, he found the passwords were years that were specifically mentioned in the Wikipedia article.

Four numbers for the password, so his thought was correct that it must be small. Knowing the two passwords, he opened 1.txt and 2.txt to see a series of words. Being involved in cryptocurrency for as long as he has been, he recognized them as a mnemonic recovery phrase. He combined the contents of file 1 and file 2 to achieve a 24-word recovery mnemonic phrase.

Gregory was not sure how to use the phrase method to recover the wallet with Bytom software, so he spent some time researching to find a medium article which explains how to do it. at this point, he reached out to Bytom team and let us know he has discovered the recovery phrase, and verified the xpub with Bytom to confirm the correct recovery.