The Man Who Found Forrest Fenn's Treasure(outsideonline.com) |
The Man Who Found Forrest Fenn's Treasure(outsideonline.com) |
But this I don't understand though:
> and they both seemed to agree that the location of the find should be kept secret
In the interest of transparency after the fact I see no problem with telling people where the treasure actually was. This gives people closure especially to the ones who suffered or the families of the ones who died hunting for it, lets them verify that the instructions they went on were indeed valid, and puts to rest other suspicions people may have.
Under these conditions a judge has nothing to go on if they want to dismiss a lawsuit claiming the finder cheated in any way. There are no details on how this happened, the initiator of the treasure hunt passed away so there's nothing stopping anyone from taking this to court. Transparency is there specifically to preempt claims like this.
Some rich idiot put a treasure box on public lands, resulting in significant amounts of damage to national parks and monuments and several deaths. It was ruined from the beginning and it's a damn shame Fenn is no longer around to be prosecuted for it.
People don’t need a $1 million treasure to get themselves into trouble in the wild. It happens regularly for reasons as trivial as selfies or even just for the fun of it. It is good that there are still places where people can do that.
People need to learn to be responsible for themselves. Supposing they were adults, going into the wilderness and not being able to survive is totally on them. "But there was a hidden treasure" is not an excuse.
People damaging national parks and monuments - again, that's on them. "But there was a hidden treasure" is not an excuse in this case either.
On average, 38 skiers and snowboarders die in the US each year ... 1600 go missing in wilderness areas ... 5000 die riding motorcycles. Treasure-hunting looks pretty safe. Feel free to hide in your home.
The "Monolith" gives me similar vibes.
I personally believe the main reason the finder won't release the location is because he found it on federal land (probably Yellowstone). But hopefully some day we'll know closer than just "Wyoming".
Unfortunately I am unable to find it in my browser history.
When asked if figuring out the puzzles required the use of anagrams, or GPS coordinates, or sophisticated codes of any sort, Stuef was clear in his response.
“No,” . . .
Prediction: this is going to end badly.
I think they very rarely rely on secondary sources, which is very similar to his approach in finding the treasure. A few examples:
- An investor who is considered one of the best technology public equity investors in history. He and his team focus on the quarterly conference calls and spend a very intensive amount of time focussing on what the executives say.
- An investor who gotten about 100x return on his mid-stage tech investments over the last 3 years. He spends his time in conversation with contacts who have first hand knowledge of the economy and growing businesses.
- An investor who was a former parter at Goldman Sachs, and retired early to invest in public equities. He spends all day looking at the balance sheets of companies.
You could store a private key in the treasure and use that to verify a signature, but how do you prove that the original hider no longer has a copy of that private key?
Then physically hide the key with said treasure.
E.g. Smart contract sends 20% of total treasure (in cryptocurrency) back to the hider each year until the treasure is withdrawn. Treasure can only be withdrawn by the finder address linked to the paper wallet (private key) that was hidden. When it is withdrawn, it sends the finder 15% of the remaining treasure each year, to an address of their choosing.
This way, it’s almost never worth it for the hider to uncover their own treasure
The rest of the article is just a ton of fluff, repeats, and padding. I for one would just like to know where the treasure was located in the end (and I don't understand why it's not just revealed, given that there's no treasure there anymore), and what was in it. Don't really care about who found it.
1. The location is either unsafe or the route to get there is
2. The location would be a pilgrimage site and therefore at risk of being destroyed
Then I remembered -- as I've mentioned a number of times here (including recently on the thread about the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search), I used to respond to https://www.eff.org/awards/coop e-mail. This is an award where EFF will give out monetary prizes for people who find large prime numbers.
A surprising number of people developed totally unshakeable confidence that they had won the award and were entitled to the money, and some of them were very persistent and very angry at me for telling them that they hadn't. Some of them wrote to me more than 80 times to try to convince me of the importance of their discoveries and to try to persuade me to award them the prize. (I'm actually kind of grateful after reading this article that none of the claimants ended up sending me a death threat.)
There were a couple of people who sent me their supposed "formulas for prime numbers" and developed a grandiose attachment to the importance of their supposed discoveries. Some of them would cc the Nobel Foundation (!) or the Clay Mathematics Institute (!) or the United Nations (!!) on their e-mails. Presumably they did this because they felt these discoveries were of such tremendous importance that they expected to receive multiple organizations' awards for them. (One or two people explicitly stated that, and suggested that their discoveries would also be important in resolving other unsolved problems in mathematics and physics.)
So one oddity about this (no pun intended) is that for some of the people, I would (probably against my better judgment and definitely against my colleagues' advice) send them specific refutations for their claims. For example, they might claim a specific number, and I would factor it with sympy, or they might claim all numbers of a specific form (e.g. "a prime number of 1s in a row"), or they might claim a formula, and I would, in addition to sending them a link to the Wikipedia article discussing how "formulas for primes" of certain forms can never exist, send them a specific counterexample. Like "sorry, 1111111111111 has thirteen 1s in a row, but it is not prime because it is divisible by 53".
Several of the people would look at my counterexamples, and, instead of concluding "oh, my reasoning must have been wrong because I was totally sure but my conclusion was mistaken" or "oh, apparently I haven't properly understood the concept of mathematical proof", they would send a new formula that was slightly tweaked, sometimes by adding 4 or something. If I then factored the resulting number, these people would then tweak the formula again and insist that they had fixed it.
At the time I was frustrated that it was so hard to get across the concept of deductive proof to people (the idea that we know that some formulas and algorithms and equalities are correct, for deductive reasons, and not just based on lucky guesses or conjecture). But thinking about this together with the Fenn treasure stuff, I want to say that there are some much deeper psychological things going on, about some people looking at a contest or treasure hunt of a certain kind and forming a resolve to be the one to solve it, leading to an unwarranted certainty that they have done so.
So I think this is a real hazard of offering a prize, especially for solving an alluring, romantic mystery that has resisted other people's efforts to resolve it: it seems that some people's identities quickly get caught up in a notion of "I'm The One" and really persistently flinch away from efforts to disabuse them of that idea.
It's also interesting to me to think how I'm involved in a lot of organized puzzle stuff where there are public challenges for people to race against each other to be the first one to resolve mysteries or challenges, but mostly those events seem to avoid these particular phenomena (not only do people not tend to threaten each other or dispute the outcome or whatever, but they tend to be very sporting about it, and consistently defer to the judgment of the puzzle creator in determining what counts as the right answer, although they might criticize a puzzle aesthetically as having too many ambiguities or red herrings or something). I guess we're lucky that these events attract people who are motivated to follow the rules and norms of the game. Maybe the puzzlehunt world benefits from (1) typically not having any prize except bragging rights or commemorative/sentimental objects, (2) having a time limit where the contest ends at some point, and (3) having a clearly identified author or editor who is recognized as having created the challenge and thereby having the right to decide what counts as a correct solution to it. (In fact, things like Cicada 3301, that lack (2) and (3), have reportedly caused some people to become kind of obsessed, not in a good way.)
I guess if you're offering a financial prize rather than "merely" trying to teach mathematics, you're probably in too deep for any of its recommendations though.
[0] http://web.mst.edu/~lmhall/WhatToDoWhenTrisectorComes.pdf
Along with each successive refutation, you should require them to include a cheque for double the last amount with their next fix, starting with a reasonable $25.
The key to understanding (at least this particular case) is: The case ... was brought by a Chicago real estate attorney named Barbara Andersen
The key is that this attorney doesn't have to pay anyone to file the suit. She does it herself. She's working pro bono on behalf of herself. A lot less expensive to do it that way.
Maybe she's bored? Maybe she's developed a bad rep and can't make enough money as a real estate attorney? Maybe she just enjoys the lulz? At any rate, all it's costing her is some filing fees. She's probably not paying an attorney by the hour to advise her.
This type of shit would go away if there was something approximating true "loser pays" in USA court. Right now the guy would have to file a counter suit, hire an attorney, and hope he wins the counter suit. And then hope that the judge awards significant damages.
In the meantime he could wind up spending the entire worth of the treasure on legal fees. Too bad he studied to be a doctor instead of a lawyer. :)
Attorneys have to be publicly registered to practice law in the location in which they are filing lawsuits.
The New Mexico state bar association lists no admitted attorney with that name.
My issue is with the idiot who left the treasure on public lands and with the idiots that vandalized public and private property to try to find it.
Out of a few hundred "treasure hunters", 6 died. Several dozen were seriously injured. "Treasure hunting" was by far the most dangerous activity of the ones you listed, even compared to motorcycle riding. And that doesn't include the damage to private or public lands caused by these idiots in their search.
The other idiots? For vandalism. National parks, national forests, national monuments, and private lands were vandalized during this search.
That's the problem, it's a "he said she said" because there's no official record. The decision to keep the location hidden even after the hunt was over makes no sense. And now the source of truth is dead with no evidence left behind, that we know of now. Imagine the lottery awarding the prize without telling you the numbers.
> Not sure how the judge would let this proceed
Because judges tend to be wary about claims made by the accused that don't have some evidence behind them to review. Fenn's log book or diary, any dated record from the time he planned and executed the preparation for the treasure hunt, or his signed affidavit could have been exactly what stopped these lawsuits in their tracks.
But as it stands neither Fenn nor the finder of the treasure considered it's a good idea to be transparent even after many people suffered financial hardship, injuries, or even death pursuing the same dream. This is not an unexpected outcome.
At least Forrest Fenn's treasure has actual value, apparently (I would join with the naysayers if it did not.)