Play Games, Win Bitcoin With THNDR Games CEO Desiree Dickerson

Company Name: THNDR Games

Founder: Desiree Dickerson, Jack Everitt, Greg Flor and Rafal Gawel

Date Founded: Originally founded in 2019 | Re-launched in 2021

Location of Headquarters: London, UK with remote team members

Amount of Bitcoin Held in Treasury: “Not enough” (said Dickerson jokingly)

Number of Employees: 6

Website:https://www.thndr.games/

Public or Private? Private

Desiree Dickerson believes that games are a powerful way to onboard people to Bitcoin.

She posits that, in recent history, games have been used to get people accustomed to using new technologies.

“They put games on the original PCs to get users familiar with a mouse,” Dickerson told Bitcoin Magazine.

“This is similar to Snake and Nokia,” she added, explaining that the game Snake was added to early Nokia feature phones “to get users familiar with the Nokia handset.”

Dickerson sees games playing a similar role when it comes to getting people used to using bitcoin on the Lightning Network.

This is why, in 2021, she helped launch a revamped version of THNDR Games, a company that has developed a suite of mobile games through which users can win sats just for playing.

And she was the perfect person for the job considering both her background as both a gamer and her experience in working with the Lightning Network.

Dickerson’s History With Gaming And Lightning

Dickerson has been gaming since she was a child.

“I grew up gaming with my dad,” she recounted. “He had NES, and I grew up playing Duck Hunt with him.”

While she’s been exposed to a variety of different games over the course of her life, as her dad had “every single gaming console,” she said that she currently thinks of herself as a “cozy gamer” and that she isn’t into more consuming (and frightening) games like HALO.

“It just has to be absolutely mindless like picking weeds in Animal Crossing,” said Dickerson with a chuckle of her current gaming preferences.

Not only does Dickerson have a long history with gaming, but she’s also been involved with the Lightning Network since just about its inception.

She began working at Lightning Labs in June 2018 and stayed there for three years before starting at THNDR Games.

Dickerson met THNDR’s original founder, Jack Everitt, while she was still at Lightning Labs. She’d come to the realization that gaming was a way to spread bitcoin, and Everitt, a gaming developer, was already hard at work developing THNDR.

The two started working together on a project called MintGox (a play on the defunct Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox) in which they showcased what companies like ZBD, Satoshi’s Games and Donner Lab were building in the Bitcoin gaming space.

By October 2021, Dickerson was CEO at THNDR.

Building THNDR Games

In the following years, THNDR rolled out 6 games, all of which were more akin to cozy games than they were to extended-play first-person shooters or other types of games that required more prolonged involvement.

These games included Club Bitcoin: Solitaire, a classic Solitaire game; Tetro Tiles, a combination of sudoku and tetris; and Bitcoin Snake, a version of the aforementioned Snake.

By September 2022, Club Bitcoin: Solitaire was the 21st (the numerical significance of which wasn’t lost on the THNDR team) most downloaded app in the Apple App Store.

Lucky number 21!🤩

#21 in the App Store⚰️

NUMER 21!

Thank you to our community & new friends who downloaded Club Bitcoin: Solitaire♣️

This is just the beginning. Now it's time to help us bring #bitcoin to everyone you know.

Copy, paste, send, repeat:https://t.co/WvPTIDWLL6pic.twitter.com/LqED2MWEWN

— THNDR (@THNDRGAMES) September 21, 2022

In October 2023, River’s Lightning Network report highlighted the fact that THNDR was responsible for 3% of the Lightning Network’s transaction growth.

Even with this success, though, Dickerson and the team at THNDR still worried that it might not be enough to make the business as profitable as they wanted it to be.

“I think the problem that we saw was that we’d launched these mobile games and they were semi-successful, but does this really scale as a venture-backed company?” Dickerson shared.

“We started thinking ‘Hey, we’ve created this new genre of Bitcoin reward games, but does it really solve a problem?’” she added.

While pondering these questions, Dickerson and the THNDR team looked to the broader online gaming space and found a dimension of it that was ripe for disruption.

Gambling and Skill-Based Wagering: Clinch and THNDR’s Next Frontier

In their research, Dickerson and the THNDR team found that the payment system for virtual casinos and online sports betting was antiquated and full of friction.

“Payments in those spaces is just completely broken,” explained Dickerson. “There are super-slow withdrawals, high fees and not a lot of flexibility with buy-in and withdrawal thresholds — and Bitcoin solves that.”

So, THNDR shifted its focus to developing a system that employed the Lightning Network’s near instant settlement time as well as its ability to process microtransactions in efforts to solve the payment problems it had discovered.

In October 2023, THNDR launched Clinch, an API that facilitates instantaneous, borderless, low-fee, and peer-to-peer wagering on Lightning. Using Clinch, online casinos, sports books and competitive gaming platforms could level up their payment systems.

THNDR also built its own skill-based wagering version of Solitaire that lets users bet notable sums of money.

“You couldn’t become a millionaire playing our [original] Solitaire game, but you can now if you start doing the skill-based wagering,” said Dickerson (not necessarily encouraging users to bet more than they can afford to lose).

“85% of our users actually requested it, and it really uncaps the monetization potential of not just Solitaire, but a suite of different games,” she added.

(To provide some context for just how much monetization potential it unlocks, Dickerson shared that the most successful company with a skill-based Solitaire game makes $25 million per month from that one game alone.)

THNDR is also looking beyond the business-to-customer (BSC) model, as it works to create white label solutions — pre-built products that a company develops and then sells to another company which then uses the product under its own name — especially for sports betting platforms.

“It’s an engagement and retention tool specifically for sports betting because, in between matches, users just leave the app because it’s like, ‘Okay, this game’s not gonna be finished for like another two hours. I’m just gonna close the app. There’s nothing to do,’” explained Dickerson. “They wanna keep people in the app and keep them betting on more things.”

Beyond Bitcoin

The team at THNDR is also looking at which other assets they can use within games.

“We’d love to explore Taproot assets or other assets and like stablecoins,” Dickerson told me.

However, don’t expect to see THNDR employing tether (USDT) on Tron anytime soon.

“Users don’t actually need to see the Bitcoin piece,” began Dickerson.

“They can bet in fiat or USD, and it all happens on Bitcoin. I’d love to expose them to bitcoin, but it’s really the properties of Bitcoin that are solving the payment issues in sports betting and skill-based wagering,” she explained.

With that said, Dickerson and the team at THNDR have hardly become fiat maximalists. They’re Bitcoiners at heart and one particular element of THNDR’s design proves it.

Disappearing Sats — For Your Own Good

Dickerson said that many THNDR users end up going down the proverbial Bitcoin rabbit hole, in part because THNDR prompts them to.

“We have a three day expiration on prizes, and if you don’t cash those prizes out, you lose them,” said Dickerson.

“You have to download a [Lightning] wallet if you want your prizes. We are getting people partially down the rabbit hole where they’re getting a wallet on their phones. This is a big step, because 80% of our users are totally new to Bitcoin,” she added.

Dickerson added that THNDR will happily refund sats to those who’ve had theirs expire. She mentioned that users can contact THNDR to make this request.

With that said, she also noted that THNDR could have very easily written into the terms and conditions of its service that the sats that disappear after three days are gone forever. The reason it doesn’t, though, is because it wants its users to learn how Bitcoin and Lightning actually work, not just maximize profits.

“We just want people to cash out and have the sats for themselves,” said Dickerson. “That’s not a business move — it’s a Bitcoiner move.”

THNDR Games Releases New Game To Earn Bitcoin Alongside Gaming Reputation System On Nostr

THNDR Games has released a new Bitcoin game called Bitcoin Blocks, which allows players to test their problem-solving skills against others to win Bitcoin. The game is similar to Tetris and Sudoku, and is available on the THNDR mobile gaming platform. THNDR has also announced the Gaming Graph, a reputation and badging system that will allow players to earn badges that are tied to their identity and can be transferred to other ecosystems.

“The launch of Bitcoin Blocks marks an important milestone in the development of THNDR’s mobile gaming platform,” the press release sent to Bitcoin Magazine states. The game is the first to showcase THNDR’s social competitive layer and features, which include Leagues, THNDR’s leveling system that pits community members against each other.

Gaming Graph will serve as a badging and reputation system for players that is easily transferable to other environments and clients, including Nostr. Through Cameri’sNIP-58, as players advance through THNDR Leagues and achieve gaming milestones, badges will be issued to their Nostr pubkey and tied to their identity, allowing users to build a virtual reputation. These established reputations built in THNDR games may have merit or value in other communities.

“We’re thrilled to add Bitcoin Blocks to the THNDR platform and continue our mission of spreading Bitcoin adoption through play,” Desiree Dickerson, THNDR CEO, explained. “By combining two familiar classics – Tetris and Sudoku – we hope to reach new users traditionally underrepresented in gaming and financial access and introduce them to Bitcoin. Bitcoin Blocks marks a major milestone for THNDR, as it showcases the first of many social, competitive features on the platform.”

THNDR plans to continue rolling out competitive gaming and social features to the platform throughout the year. The company’s most recent title “Club Bitcoin: Solitaire,” has become the highest ranking bitcoin game of all time, reaching #21 in the U.S. App Store, according to THNDR.

The Story Behind The Bitcoin Infinity Day Public/Private Keys

The story of the Bitcoin Infinity Day Keys spans seven months of my life. The story evolves and transforms until it reaches its final form, crystallizing forever like the root of a Merkle tree. Over these seven months, the keys went from a test design I threw together and forgot about to a project that consumed my every waking moment. I’m going to take you on a walk through my mind to observe the path from idea to reality.

As the idea spread through the Bitcoin community, serendipitous manifestations would arise, leading the project in unimagined directions. A message here, a tweet there. Each piece is a subtle nudge in the direction of mapping out the end result. The idea grew and blossomed over time, pushed from one boundary to another on its hero’s quest to actualization. I’ve tried to find those pivotal moments to share with you. This is the story of how it all came to pass.

The Idea

The idea for the keys presented itself in a sly, roundabout way. It didn’t arrive as a finished vision, but rather as a stepping stone from one level of skill to another. I had just completed The Bitcoin Full Node Sculpture 7.0 made out of silver mirror and was preparing to start on #8 (it is a series of 10 sculptures).

As an artist, I always want to grow with each new project. Not only because doing the same thing over and over can be boring (even when successful), it’s also a safe zone. The world and market motivate you to repeat your greatest hits but you do that at the expense of furthering your growth. I like to try things that I’m not sure I can pull off. I try to work at a level slightly above my current skill set. This is the way I grow. It takes a ton of experimentation and testing to obtain and grow the skills. It also takes a willingness to fail. Failing is fine and should be done hard and fast so you can move on to winning.

The next move for me was to see if I could use colored mirrors to create new dimensions in the node sculpture. I quickly put together a two-layer design. Then I engraved, cut, painted, and assembled the test pieces. I had four colors of mirror to work with — silver, gold, blue, and rose gold — so I made 16 pieces to test all the different color combinations. Check out the tweet for the original video.

I got a lot of encouragement and, surprisingly, people wanted to buy my test cut design as an art piece. I wasn’t prepared for this at all. I didn’t think of the design as anything other than a test for a future sculpture. People were breathing life into the concept that the keys stood as their own design. I quickly fell in love with the idea. An art piece for the Plebs. In an edition of 210.

On the same day, July 5, I

tweeted this video

and then, just as quickly as I fell in love with the idea, I forgot about it.

It’s easy to forget about things when I‘m working on a project. My attention gets sucked in like a whirlpool until I’m far too deep to pay attention to anything else. I spent the next month working like this, tirelessly. By August 7, 2021, I completed the Full Node Sculpture #8.

This was about two weeks before the first Bitcoin Infinity Day: August 21, 2021.

Before we go any further, I want to make sure you’re familiar with the origins behind the Infinity Day keys. I made them to help spread the meme created by Knut Svanholm, “Bitcoin: Everything there is, divided by 21 million” and the original article, released August 21, 2020, called “Deeper Down the Rabbit Hole.”

It’s fun to note — and Knut says it was unintentional — that the original article was published on August 21, 2020. That date can be written more succinctly as “8/21.” Notice that the “8” can be viewed as an infinity symbol (∞) standing on its end. So the date “8/21” can be read as Knut’s meme: “Everything there is (infinity or “8”), divided by 21 (million).” So August 8 is Bitcoin Infinity Day. This is astounding, considering it was published on August 8, a year before the Bitcoin Infinity Day meme even existed.The idea for Bitcoin Infinity Day seems to have arisen right around the time I finished the sculpture (August 10, 2021). This is only 11 days! Not much time to birth a meme holiday…

The First Transformation

The idea for the Infinity Day Key came during a private conversation with the collector who purchased the Full Node Sculpture #8. Without this one comment from @Protagonist4now at 5:21 on August 17, the Infinity Day Keys would probably never have happened. He was asking me why Knut didn’t have one of the Bitcoin Full Node Sculptures…

On August 19, just two days before Infinity Day, I was able to get sculpture #8 shipped out. With that project done I could work on a new one, but time was short. It was August 20, just one day left.

Not sure if I could pull it off, I knew it was a pass-or-fail idea. I’d either do it in time and it’d be awesome, or I’d end up empty-handed and no one would know this was ever an idea. The only way to find out was to try. Proof of work. I reached out to Knut to get the “look” he liked for the meme.

So now it was almost 2 p.m. on the day before Bitcoin Infinity Day — crunch time. Just 10 hours left until the first-ever Bitcoin Infinity Day. I worked through the night and into the next day. Almost 24 hours later, I was done. I tweeted this video at 3:41 p.m. EST. I thought this was the end of the Infinity Day key project. But, as we know, life has a way of reorienting us when we least expect it…

Original goal: Achieved! Here’s a photo of

Knut Svanholm

After posting the Infinity Day key video, I began to get a barrage of tweets and DMs of plebs asking to buy a key. Since I never planned to sell the keys, I made only five of them. I planned to make a few extras to account for errors and mistakes, but all five turned out great. I knew I wanted to give two to Knut as a gift, but I wasn’t sure what to do with the other keys. Also, I wasn’t sure how I’d price the key fairly, as my last piece sold for 15.1 bitcoin. So I decided to do a giveaway.

The contest went on for about a week and I realized I loved so many of the answers that I had more than two people I considered winners. I highly recommend

checking out the thread

, it’s densely packed with interesting Bitcoin trivia. You can see here where we jump from two keys as the giveaway to five and then to 21. I even added the idea to auction the last key here.

Originally I was going to auction key #21 of 21 on

Scarce.city

, but again the idea man, @Protagonist4Now came through with the vision — #8 of 21 would be the one to auction, as it is the physical embodiment of the “8/21” meme within the set.

video here

That was on September 11, and below

in this thread on October 9,

you can see I just finished the 21 private keys. I have

videos of each of the keys

in the thread. The

first video

shows all the pieces after being cut, engraved and painted, but not yet assembled.

You can see the list of the 20 Private Key winners

here

:

The Public Keys – One for the Plebs

I started thinking about it, and over a few days the idea solidified. We’ll get more into the design of the sale and how it works soon, but the important thing here was that I wanted to do a sale that was open to everyone. Anyone could get a key as long as they were able to get into the sale “in time.” I would not be doing something like this again, but I wanted to make sure everyone had at least this one chance to own an original FractalEncrypt art piece. But the window would be short, and people had to be ready and have bitcoin handy to pay (so I had to give people time to get sats out of cold storage, etc.).

Michael Saylor is probably the most famous of the key winners. Here’s a never-before-seen photo from Bitcoin White Paper Day 2021.Saylor owns Private Key #11 and is also the owner of one of the artist-proof versions of the Public Key.

Third Transformation — Holographic Rainbow Background

I was working on the

Bitcoin Full Node Sculpture #9 of 10

I made an

artist’s proof

The Auction and The Sale

As things took shape, I prepared for the auction of Private key #8 of 21 and the sale of the Public Keys. This was set for the weekend of October 31, 2021, the 13th anniversary of Bitcoin White Paper Day.

Scarce.city

with actualizing. I wanted the sale to be defined by the Bitcoin network. It would be a limited-time sale, but not limited by clock time, but rather the world’s first sale limited to Bitcoin block time. The sale wouldn’t run for a set number of hours or days, but instead for a set number of blocks mined in the Bitcoin network.

The duration of the sale would be entirely decided by Bitcoin block time. The edition size (how many keys I would need to make), was also left entirely up to bitcoiners. I would make as few or as many keys as were ordered, no more, no less. If people bought three, I’d make only three. If they bought 1,000, I’d make 1,000. The price would increase as new blocks were mined. This meant waiting had a cost. If you wanted a key, the longer you waited to buy one, the more expensive it got.

As the day of the sale got closer, I began to get concerned. I wasn’t sure if the sale concept would make sense to others, so I reached out to some collectors I know, (Eric Weiss and Jeff (@SatoshisArk), and asked for opinions. I explained the idea, but both guys seemed confused, so that made me more uncomfortable.

This is the explanation of how the sale would work on the Public Key Sale page on Scarce.City (the bitcoin-only auction site);

The idea for the sale was this:

It is a limited-time offer, but available not for a specified time, but rather a specified number of Bitcoin blocks. Bitcoin blocks are mined about every 10 minutes so 210 blocks would take about 36 hours, or a day and a half to elapse.

Anyone can buy at any time during the 210 block window and there is no limit on how many keys would be made.

The price will increase by about $5 every time a new block is mined (this turned out to be 8200 sats per block on the day of the sale).

Once the 210th block was mined, the edition would be locked at the final sale count.

The morning of Saturday, October 30 arrived full force. I woke up nervous. Was my idea too far out there. Would people understand? Does anyone even care?

The sale of the Public Keys started first. It was set to begin as soon as the first block was mined after 11:11 AM, which was block 707,443. The amazing thing is that collectors wanted to be the very first to click “buy” once the sale went live, so they could get lower edition numbers. The first buyer to click buy, would get key #1, the second would get key #2. However no one knew when the sale would begin, since it began only once a block was mined after 11:11 AM. The block was not mined until 11:17, a LONG 6 minute wait for plebs with fingers at the ready.

42 keys were sold before the next block was mined only 21 seconds later. The sheer dedication of those bitcoiners who were ready at the keyboard, and clicked “buy” before that next block was mined just seconds later, cannot be overstated. As we know from Douglas Adams’ writing, the number 42 in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” is the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything”. I took this to be a good sign, but I’m not one to declare victory before the end of the battle, so I remained cautious.

By the time the Private Key auction started at 3:33 p.m., just over 100 of the Public Keys were sold. Bidding on the Private Key went live and we were at 0.1 BTC within an hour.

I woke up excited. Not only would both the auction and the sale end today, but I was going to a fancy invite-only bitcoiner BBQ for Bitcoin White Paper Day. I arrived just before noon, made the rounds and settled in at a table by the pool while I tried not to look too anti-social watching the auction on my phone. Around 1 p.m., with only two hours left before the end of the auction, we hit 0.25 BTC. A bidding war broke out between ObiWan, willebra and TH pushing us over half a bitcoin. What happened next shocked everyone.

In disbelief I say, “This must be an accident!” Eric inhaled, thought for a second and agreed. No. No way the bid went from 0.575 BTC to 6 BTC. I took some deep breaths, calmed down and in a few moments the page updated. The world zoomed back into focus. Not 6.0 BTC. One-tenth of that: 0.6 BTC. Okay.

The bidding went on for another 30 minutes. Hitting 1.0 BTC was a beautiful moment and the auction came to a climax with a bid at 1.05 BTC by pekf73.

Now with the Private Key sale over, the adrenaline rush hit me hard. I switched focus back over to the Public Key sale. The Public Key sale edition amount would be entirely decided by how many plebs bought keys.

I checked the current total and we were at 199 keys. I saw

this tweet

from Glenn Hodl and I saw the vision immediately. 210. I certainly didn’t know how much work it would be to make that many keys.

With hours to go, and the price increasing every 10 minutes… is it going to hit 210?

It was a long weekend and the sale was going to close in about hours. I needed some sleep. My heart wanted to stay awake but my mind was not having it. By this time the counter was at 206 keys. I couldn’t stay up anymore. I gave up on the dream of hitting 210 keys. The fact is, the price got higher with each passing block, so selling more keys became less and less likely with each block mined. I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer. I went to sleep. 206 was a good run, nothing to be ashamed of.

The next morning I woke up to a Bitcoin miracle. By the very last block of the sale, block number 210, only 208 keys had sold. It was over and done with, we weren’t hitting 210.

Then, literally in the nick of time, in that very last block

bought both 209 and 210, forever cementing the edition in at a perfect 21:210 ratio of Private Keys to Public Keys. Absolutely beautiful.

The anon pleb who bought #210 created this

.

Now you might think the story ends here, but there’s so much more. Once the 210 keys were sold, I needed to make and ship them all. On the sale page, I wrote that it would take me 4-6 weeks to have the keys completed and shipped. Later I realized that I set this time frame before I even knew how many keys I would sell. Making the 21 Private Keys took longer than I thought, but making 210 keys took the amount of work required to a whole new level.

We’ll jump into the creation process and I’ll share some insights into the journey, but first we have the next transformation.

Fourth Transformation — Taproot Keypairs

It all started with this question:

It got me thinking. I had what I thought was an answer, but it wasn’t a very good one. In the end, things got much deeper and far more interesting. Take note of the date, it’s Oct 31. Things take time to percolate.

About two weeks later,

Taproot activated

on the Bitcoin network at block height 709,632. This block was mined just before midnight on November 14 in my timezone and while I was sleeping, cypherpunks were playing. By the time I woke up, many interesting taproot transactions had been sent and then discovered by other cypherpunks. I began exploring everything I could find.

this tweet

Click on the image below and take a look at this transaction. Take note of the vanity addresses of course, but also the values transacted. 0.1337 BTC sent and then the first 3 inputs have values of 340, 341, and 342, these correlate to the Bitcoin Improvement Proposals related to taproot.

Whaaaaaaa?!?!

— FractalEncrypt ∞/21M (@FractalEncrypt) November 14, 2021

The fourth transaction contained the first 2-of-2 scriptpath spend.

pic.twitter.com/h9w8jhsjA5

November 14, 2021

Looks like I found this around 9:23 AM.

Then just eight minutes later I get a message from

Yegor Petrov

, “Hey Fractal”;

These two puzzle pieces clicked and fit together perfectly. Combining an on-chain Certificate-of-Authenticity for the keys using taproot vanity addresses with an OP_RETURN (hidden message)… a fire was lit within my mind.

First things first, I needed to download the new version of Bitcoin Core so I could get the new taproot functionality and begin teaching myself how to do this.

in this tweet thread

. It has links to all my educational sources and screenshots as well.

trying and failing to create taproot addresses in Bitcoin Core

because that functionality is not yet released. You know when you’re trying to do something and you run into a wall? Well, we can’t give up, this is Bitcoin. There’s either going to be a way to do this or an explanation as to why we can’t.

Andy to the rescue

!

this from Learning Bitcoin From the Command Line,

this

Now that I had a few hours’ worth of foundations in taproot, I needed to find out how to generate vanity addresses. I looked at several methods before landing on the

. It was created by Bitcoin Core developer

Andy Chow

. (again, Andy to the rescue, and he will become much more helpful soon.)

Link in hand, I downloaded the program, excited to get rolling and immediately ran into a series of errors that took me hoursof hard work to get past.

I installed Rust and a bunch of other dependencies, but nothing was working. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t get the program to do anything. So what do I do? Request help through Twitter DMs from the guy who wrote the software. I know this is probably not “the way” I should do it. It’d be more polite to ask via a post on StackExchange or BitcoinTalk, but luckily, within a very short window, I got a response, and it was exactly what I needed.

With this simple, magnificent piece of info, I was rolling! I’ll note that this step is nowhere to be found in the Readme on Github.

However there is something in Bitcoin known as the “dust limit” it’s an anti-spam feature of Bitcoin, and also helps avoid “blockchain bloat.”

Instead of looking up the dust limit myself, I decided to “

ask Twitter

”, not something I’d usually do. This post is at 4:07 p.m. on Nov. 18 about 30 minutes after I figured out the last step (constructing and importing taproot descriptors into Bitcoin Core).

At first, I wasn’t getting any helpful answers so I did what any good bitcoiner would do, verify the shit myself. I constructed a transaction with a one sat output in my Bitcoin Core QT wallet.

Then at 4:31 p.m., Michael Moffit posted this.

Then he dropped

and cemented the path forward for the taproot keypairs.

That lead me to Vijay Boyapati’s

amazing idea and execution

(which I copied; steal like an artist they say!):

on-chain bitcoin transaction

The timing of events here is an astounding unfolding. Consider the vanity taproot address generator software was released on November 10, 2021, just days before this. Vijay’s tweets were from September and October 2021, just weeks from this moment of realization. These building blocks are critical and necessary for the Bitcoin Infinity Keys to find their final form. And the building blocks themselves are forged by both the code and human facets of the bitcoin network.

Mining the Vanity Taproot Bitcoin Addresses

Here’s how the process of mining the vanity addresses works. The software asks you to define the vanity words or phrases you want to find. Imagine you wanted to say “Hello World.” You’d enter that into the vanity address software as “bc1pHelloWorld.” The “bc1p” prefix is required for all taproot bitcoin addresses (also known as “bech32m” addresses), and then your vanity words go after the prefix. The software then begins searching for any Public/Private key combination that results in a bitcoin address with your prefix.

Depending on how many letters or characters are in your search, your search may be quick or take an eternity. The more characters, the longer it will take. To find the 3-letter “key” addresses didn’t take long at all, however, to find an address with bc1pFractal it took me almost 5 days to find a single key pair. Finding bc1pEncrypt took me another 7 days and I almost quit looking for it as I was running out of time. Finding a bc1pFractalEncrypt address may have taken me more than my lifetime so I didn’t even attempt it.

Once I mined 210 “key” addresses I was ready to go. Or so I thought. As I started looking at the addresses, I noticed that some had numbers following the word “key.” This meant that I could have addresses like “Key1, Key2, Key3, …, Key210” I began searching and sorting my addresses to see what I had. I quickly saw that I already had many addresses that followed this format and I began organizing them.

Once done, I went back into the vanity address generator and began trying to find the missing addresses. I was missing “key1” so, of course, that was the first one I tried to mine. Immediately I hit a brick wall. “1” is a restricted character in taproot addresses, so mining any address with a 1 would be impossible. So that ruined that whole idea. I can’t do a series of numbers without “1” 1, 11–19, 21, 31, …, 100–199, etc. I was screwed. I had an okay idea, but it just wasn’t actually possible.

After a few minutes of thinking, I came up with the idea to try a lowercase “L” in place of the “1”s and see if that would work. It did. Okay, back in business!

Mining the addresses in a series like this was extremely time-consuming and I only made it to 50 before the addresses became too hard to mine, and I ran out of time. So keys 1–50 are special for this feature alone.

After “50” the only numbers I was able to mine the “numbered key” vanity addresses for were these:

Testnet Transaction

To create a Bitcoin transaction, I used a simple text editor called Notepad. I just typed it all out (or copied/pasted in the case of addresses). I’d never written a transaction this big before, it was intimidating. 210 outputs! Each output was one of the bitcoin vanity addresses I mined. But before I used the precious vanity addresses and spent real bitcoin, I needed to test things out. Mistakes on-chain are forever, so I didn’t want to look like an idiot to far-future generations.

The good thing is, once I created the testnet transaction, I could use that same text file as a template to create my “real” mainnet transaction later. In my testnet transaction, I didn’t use my precious vanity addresses, I just used regular bech32 addresses (taproot are bech32m addresses). The raw bitcoin transaction simply states what inputs are being spent and how they are spent. Here we see 2 inputs followed by the first 26 testnet addresses.

transaction

as well.

In addition to not writing out a specific fee amount (meaning you can make a big expensive mistake without realizing it), the fee is based on how many characters are in your transaction. This is called “sats per byte” and you pay your fees in a specific amount of satoshis for each letter or number you want to include on-chain.

For comparison, a regular transaction with two inputs and two outputs averages 150 – 250 bytes. I made a guess and figured for 200 outputs, maybe this would be about 105,000 bytes (half of 210, then multiplied by 100). In my guestimation, I paid out 109,467 testnet satoshis (or 0.00109467 tBTC) in fees. I knew if I was too low, my node would not send the transaction. There is a minimum of 1 sat/byte that is enforced by my node, so it won’t send a transaction with a smaller fee than that. An error is my indication that I’ve underestimated. If you overestimate, well, too bad, you just overpay for your transaction. That’s why we do this on testnet.

only turned out to be 6996 bytes. I thought it was going to be closer to 100,000 bytes. Sending these batch transactions is very economical in terms of both onchain data and the cost to place it there.

I did make a mistake in the testnet transaction and if I hadn’t caught it, I would’ve looked like an idiot to all my descendants and brought shame to my family. I had two outputs paying 1003 satoshis. Whoops, but this is why we do things on testnet first. Luckily I did catch this and was able to fix it before sending my “real” mainnet transaction.

Making the Keys

Video link

).

tweet above

and scroll down in the thread to see a video of the laser machine cutting the clear back pieces. I covered the Private Key plates in the video with the microfiber glove.

Once the pieces are cut, I have to paint each one. I also custom cut and apply double-sided industrial adhesive that welds the pieces together.

Painting all the pieces was a much larger job than I expected and I needed to acquire new tools and skills to pull it off. I also needed this big bounce-house-inspired inflatable paint booth!

Here are a few pics of painting the key pieces. This was my first time using a professional auto paint sprayer and I have to say the results came out fantastic.

The Art of The Transaction

While I was busy making the physical key parts, I put off sending the mainnet bitcoin transaction. I just took the risk and engraved all the Public Addresses into the mirrored plates and painted them. Heck, I even had the private keys all cut, engraved, and painted too. Failure here would be disastrous. If anything went wrong and I wasn’t able to send the transaction and use these keypairs, all that work would be wasted. Time for the acid test. I needed to send that transaction!

I took a few days to get the file set up correctly, checked, double-checked and ready to send. By the time it was done, I felt the transaction itself was a work of art. I encoded all kinds of Easter eggs into the transaction, not only what you could see in the text of the transaction, but even the fee amount. I had calculated the fee to the exact satoshi (we talked about the fee amounts before — remember, this is something you do not write into the transaction, it’s implied). I don’t think I could say this for many transactions, but even the

raw hexadecimal signed transaction

is beautiful.

Bitcoin Is Time

Let’s back up one second here. Before I was able to send the main transaction, I had to pre-fund my vanity addresses. It took me almost two weeks to mine these two addresses, and I wanted to fund them with exactly the right amount of satoshis, no more, no less. This must be executed with surgical precision.

This is the pre-funding transaction. I want to spend frommy “FractalEncrypt” addresses to all the Public Key Addresses. To do that I needed to make sure I had the right amount of bitcoin in the right addresses.

I was hoping

to have the transaction mined at a specific time, to add to the magic, but that was not to be. That’s okay, we take our wins where we can take them.

I wanted the transaction to be sent at a cool date and time. The date was December 21, 2021, so 12/21, and

The clock was running down. It was getting close to 8:21. I didn’t want to submit my transaction too soon or too late. A bitcoin block can be mined at any time, so I was afraid to send my transaction too early. It was a risk, but one I had to take. It was 8:20, and no block had been mined in the past 9 minutes, it was almost perfect. The tension was insane. I had to send it right then.

I clicked to send and… FUCK!

The transaction wouldn’t send! I didn’t have enough in fees. Fuck! My testnet transaction was 6996 bytes, so I thought by sending 8,888 satoshis in fees, I would be overpaying, not underpaying! This was a disaster of the highest order. I didn’t have

any more satoshis in my vanity addresses and sending more to them just wouldn’t look the way I want onchain. The feeling of defeat at that moment cannot be explained.

I got myself together and began thinking. Maybe 8:21 was something of an illusion. Maybe I just see that in block explorers because that is my local time…if this is true, then it’ll be 8:21 in one more hour, one timezone to the west of me. Back to Twitter. And, yes. That’s how it works.

So now I knew I had another 50+ minutes to figure out some way to get my transaction sent without ruining any of my encoded Easter eggs. I knew I could mine a new simple vanity address and send funds to that. I’d use those new funds to pay the missing fee amount. Instead of having my send addresses be the “Fractal” and “Encrypt” addresses, I could add a third address that contained the fees and I could make it say anything I wanted.

I went to my list of vanity keys that I’d already mined, but not yet used. I found one of the keys was a “bc1pkeys” address. Using this would make the send addresses:

“Fractal Encrypt Keys”

This was cool, I liked it, but now I needed to decide how much in fees to pay. I knew I needed to pay at least 9248 in fees because of this error, but that number had nothing to do with the “8/21” meme, so…

My prior fee amount was 8,888 but since that was too low, I pondered other numbers like 21,888 and 21,821 but settled on 88,888 to dig into the “Infinity” part of the meme deeper. To do this, I had to construct a new taproot descriptor for the private key of this new address, import it into Bitcoin Core to be able to spend to and from it and then send some sats there. I had to do all this quickly, as I had under an hour left.

Judging by the timestamp on

the funding transaction for this address

, it took me about 15 minutes after the first transaction failed (from 8:21 p.m. when the transaction failed to 8:36 p.m. when this transaction was confirmed) This may seem quick, but it was an intense and terror-fraught 15 minutes. Notice I didn’t put any fancy messages in this one. Stressed!

With this transaction confirmed, I had 80,000 satoshis in my “keys” address, allowing me to add these new funds to my transaction as an input. By doing this, I could spend the full amount. Adding the new 80,000 sats to the 8,888 I already had in my transaction would bring my total to 88,888. This is why I said that the amounts in the addresses had to be handled with surgical precision. An error of a single satoshi would ruin the magic.

Now I just had to wait for 9:21 p.m. EST, which would be 8:21 CST. Also, 8 p.m. is 20:00 in military time (or 24-hour time), this makes 9 p.m. 21:00 so if I could get it at 21:21, that would be magical! It was not to be, I was off by seconds, and it went through at 21:20. Here’s the transaction. See how many Easter eggs you can find yourself or just continue reading for the spoilers.

We can see the transaction is recognized as a taproot transaction, but this was also my first-ever RBF transaction. I’d been wanting to learn that for a while, and never did until now. I’m proud of this RBF flag!

The three inputs in the transaction have the vanity addresses reading “FractalEncrypt Keys”:

And here we can see the two input values of “8” and “21”

A Path Not Taken: 21-of-210 Multisig Treasure Hunt

I thought it would be cool to combine all the addresses on all the keys into one huge multisig “pot” that could only be accessed by possessing access to 21 of the keys. I wanted to make it so all keys are part of a 21-of-210 multisig scheme so that if any one person or group of key owners assembled any 21 of the 210 keys they could spend all the sats in all 210 of the addresses. This may not be worthwhile today, but in 20 – 50 years, it may be a treasure worth hunting down the keys to unlock (literally!).

I can imagine a dedicated collector hunting down 21 of the keys, or convincing a group of other key owners to join forces to unlock generational wealth. It was a nice daydream, but the fact is, writing this transaction (if possible) would have been a huge undertaking! I quickly found out that I could not use 210 keys together in a giant multisig.

The most I would be able to use together at one time was 20

.

Shipping The Keys

Once I had all the key pieces cut, engraved, painted and ready to assemble, it took me almost two weeks to get them all completed. I had hoped to ship them in time for the 2021 winter holidays but didn’t have them shipped until early January 2022.

Even putting the labels on the boxes took me a full weekend of non-stop work. When you’re trying to get precisely numbered sculptures matched to 200+ shipping labels, it takes attention to detail. It also takes patience. I also ran into unexpected supply chain issues. The Private Keys were shipped using a laser-cuttable foam. I was able to custom-cut the foam to fit the boxes and the sculpture.

But when I tried to order enough of the foam to ship 210 keys, I ran into supply chain issues. The foam wasn’t available in any size, at any price. So I ended up buying a bubble wrap-making machine and making the packaging myself. My whole art room was filled with rolls of bubble wrap that I filled myself. It was a pretty interesting process and, in the end, I now have a new cool machine.

By the end of the weekend, my front porch was filled with boxes ready to go out into the world.

The UPS driver wanted to know what I was shipping. I said marijuana. Just kidding. I tried to explain the keys without mentioning bitcoin or anything too specific (for opsec). She was like, “oh cool, art.”

And with that, the keys were sent to their new homes and this story comes to a close. As the keys arrived in their homes, I saw many delightful posts and received messages from the new owners. I’m sure the close of this story is the beginning of many others. Thanks for sharing the journey with me. Happy Bitcoining!