Rogue Signal
Pyramid Scheme was back for a second year at the Bitcoin 2023 conference! If you are unfamiliar with this game, please do take a look at our walk-through of the first iteration of the game from last year. We won’t be covering all of the details of the theme or how the game works here, but rather walking through some of the more interesting puzzles and challenges from this year.
Many types of puzzles have visual elements to them. From literal jigsaw puzzles that display an image when completed to marketing campaigns with hidden meaning through iconography and subtle placement of visual elements, embedding puzzles into artwork is a natural fit for Artists.
This guide is intended to provide Artists with an introduction to puzzle-integrated art and provide some examples and brainstorming prompts to get the creative juices flowing.
For the Pacific Bitcoin 2022 conference we created a short game that followed a surfing narrative, as surfing was also a central theme of the Santa Monica, California based conference.
I)ruid has been bringing challenges and puzzles to DEF CON himself for over two decades, and under the Rogue Signal brand for nearly half of that time. This year, for DEF CON 30, we significantly upped our game by building and branding a custom Scramble! game interface that we’ve dubbed “Hac-Man“.
After Dustin D. Trammell‘s little puzzle for the Bitcoin 2021 conference was so well received (albeit by a small number of players), Dustin decided to build a much larger, more in-depth and complicated puzzle and challenge game for the following year, Bitcoin 2022. What resulted was absolutely epic in both size and scope… We called it Pyramid Scheme (because LOL fiat money visual design).
After ariving late in the evening the day before the Bitcoin 2021 conference, I was unable to sleep, so I decided to create and host a puzzle for the conference with a Bitcoin prize. I utilized my Twitter account to announce and post clues to the puzzle.
This is a walk-through of the puzzle and its solution. Spoilers below!!!