How many decryptions does it take to get to the center of the Russian Nesting Doll? The Earth Key was release on May 12th and the race was on to keep track of the various feeds and information from around the Internet. Many thanks to ToshiCiphers, EV and other hunters for much of the legwork!
Clicking through Breakbeats on the Beach, we are tantalized with a little more of the story --
The last key was a bit of a trek for some Hunters, but your help was greatly appreciated. Maybe now it’s time to kick back with some tunes and relax a bit. The world is heating up all over, and it might be time for some beach time with blue skies. That said, a Hunter is always hunting…
Just when you started to scratch your head and wonder where you should go from here, Eric, aka @wheatpond on Twitter -- the de facto spokesperson for Satoshi’s Treasure hunt tweeted:
Not seeing the hashtag #notaclue -- a necessary practice that Eric has adopted, lest everything he says is analyzed -- “...wait, he tweeted what he had for breakfast, that must mean something about key 005!” Hunters around the world followed the link to the musical stylings of Asian Dan and his indie sensation @LILINTERNET.
The pulsating base of this track streams from Soundcloud as an MP3, we note there are some links to follow and some comments placed in the track tie nicely into themes that we have been seeing --
Namely, Chris Maker and a promo video for his film Level 5. “Alexa, tell me about Level 5”...”According to Wikipedia, Level Five is a 1997 French film, directed by the media artist Chris Marker, starring Catherine Belkhodja as the only human actor within a virtual reality world.”
The promo, features a familiar writer from Key #005 - The Hunted Key -- William Gibson --
Returning to the MP3, Hunters are immediately suspicious that something might be hidden in the song -- we spent too many hours staring at decryption algorithms, Hex code and steganography on Agent 2’s image to think anything else -- -- which, incidentally has become a favorite word on my Samsung S8's keyboard. Firing up Sonic Visualizer, an open source sound editor and analyzer, and loading the MP3, Hunters began to flip, slow down, speed and analyze the file. It was discover however that using the Spectrogram feature, two clues materialize and begin to take shape -- one, what clearly is a muddy QR code -- well, maybe not clearly, but trust me it does --
After much fiddling and hand drawing, someone was able to get it to scan -- http://satoshistreasure.xyz/quickbrownfox which leads to...oh shoot, now we need a passphrase.
Turns out that if you gave up and shutdown Sonic Visualizer before you got through more of the song, you may have missed the message at 3:40
It is not necessary 2 understand music, it is only necessary that 1 enjoy it.
Upon entering the correct phrase and striking that enter key we are brought to...the key? No, another hint, within the hint is a link to an image of some "fox like Satoshi’s Treasure brand Russian Nesting Doll" -- of course, you saw that coming, didn’t you?
Sound waves shake every bone in your body and you see a shimmering object warp into existence in front of you, as if it was shaken out of a fold in some other dimension. It drops to the floor: a Russian nesting doll. It’s hard to look at, as though its partially obscured by some kind of chaotic field. A note written in nearly illegible chicken scratch falls next to it, as the song fades out:
This mustn’t fall into the wrong hands. You were always more devout than I was. ESV Luke 12:2, first three words, and then last 5 words. Guard what you receive jealously.
Running to my kids room and grabbing the souvenir nesting doll from our vacation to NYC’s Central Park, I begin my examination and comparison and realize that the rabbit hole continues down into darkness.
