On Thursday morning, a closely watched Bitcoin wallet address known as 1FLAMEN6 had a surprise transaction that drained the account of its five bitcoins, worth nearly $50,000 at the time. This Bitcoin wallet belonged to a crypto artist who goes by @coin_artist on Twitter, but she wasn’t despairing about the lost bitcoins—in fact, she was ecstatic.

The 1FLAMEN6 wallet was attached to a puzzle designed by @coin_artist and fellow crypto artist Rob Myers in 2015. The puzzle centered on a painting created by @coin_artist called “TORCHED H34R7S.” It was the final piece of a series of minor puzzles that had to be solved before the painting could be accessed for a shot at discovering the private key to the 1FLAMEN6 Bitcoin wallet. When @coin_artist saw someone had swiped the bitcoins from the wallet on Thursday morning, she knew the puzzle had finally been solved—almost three years after she created it.

The painting is a #puzzle, there is 4.87 #bitcoin concealed by this image. Happy #EasterEgg http://t.co/2KASaawd3u pic.twitter.com/90kuCshXj1

— YT▷ (@coin_artist) April 3, 2015

@coin_artist told me that she hadn’t originally expected the puzzle to take so long to solve. After it was announced on the popular Bitcointalk forum, an obsessive community soon formed that was dedicated to solving the puzzle. Yet when no one was able to crack the code after months of effort, @coin_artist said interest in the project began to wane.

“People had largely given up prior to the bull run,” @coin_artist told me on Telegram. “I think Bitcoin’s price rejuvenated interest in 2017.”

According to Isaac*, the 30-year old programmer who actually solved the puzzle, he hadn’t even heard of the puzzle until a little over a month ago. (Isaac’s name has been changed to protect his anonymity. As he told me on Telegram, “it’s not safe to have Bitcoin in my country.”) He told me he originally found the puzzle because he and his wife enjoy solving riddles and he was deliberately looking for puzzles related to cryptocurrencies.

Isaac detailed his process of solving the puzzle to me in a chat, and his solution was corroborated by @coin_artist. He shared screenshots of his conversations with other puzzle players, and to prove that he was in fact in control of the coins, Isaac also signed a message to the wallet address using the phrase that was placed before the start of the Bitcoin wallet private key coded into the painting.

That phrase was “B34u7y, truth, and rarity.”

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