Seed Cipher #912169 - 1/1 Original

Seed Cipher #912169 1/1 Original 10 x 20" Hand painted oil based metallic & acrylic on 1.5" deep laser engraved Ampersand basswood panel & laser etched 4 x 6" stainless steel sheet Includes a custom UV ink Hahnemühle certificate of authenticity If one were to say that bitcoin is the knowledge of a private key that allows an individual to transact with the balance of an address on the Timechain, then both in essence, and in actuality, this painting is bitcoin. The painting is the Cipher Key. It is accompanied by a laser etched stainless steel plate. This seed plate contains the Cipher Text. The artwork consists of 96 3x3 dot grids. Each 3x3 grid of dots represents one letter of a seed word. Their value remains arbitrary until they are assigned a letter by the user based on a seed phrase they have generated. Once assigned, the letters are stamped into the custom seed plate, each matching its associated 3x3 dot grid. The order is scrambled. The painting is the key that decrypts the order of the letters, and thus the seed phrase. Once the user has generated a bitcoin seed with sufficient entropy, and has stamped the first four letters of each word into this plate, it is a provably secure way to encrypt a seed phrase, and thus store bitcoin. Since the letters are scrambled on the seed plate, the words are unrecognizable. This provides additional security, as anyone finding the seed plate would not be able to decrypt it without the painting. And anyone looking at the painting would not be able to decrypt it without the seed plate. In order to decrypt the seed phrase, one needs both the painting and the seed plate, making this a seed XOR of sorts. If the seed plate is used to encrypt an address that contains bitcoin, it must of course still be securely hidden. What is interesting, is that the painting itself can be displayed publicly, and without knowing what value the 3x3 grids have been assigned, the chance of someone cracking a seed phrase that has been encrypted to it is the same as randomly guessing any 128-bit private key. The odds of guessing a 256-bit private key are approximately 1 in 115,792,089,237,316,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. In an attempt to understand how large that number is, consider that it is more than the approximate number of atoms in the Milky Way Galaxy. There is something magical about the process of rolling dice in the physical realm, using the entropy of the universe, to pick a seed that a private/public key pair is derived from, in order to sign digital transactions of a monetary unit backed by thermodynamic energy. It is utterly fascinating to then take this modern wonder of digital cryptography in the form of a mnemonic phrase and encrypt it using a physical painting of a substitution cipher.

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