I am the Coin (Puzzle consisting of 20,000 custom minted coins) | Hacker News Reader

I am the Coin (Puzzle consisting of 20,000 custom minted coins)

iamthecoin.com

7 pointspmg14 comments

If anyone is interested in actually reading the story, I've put the plaintext up at http://paste.pocoo.org/raw/162110/, preserving the line breaks in the original.

Edit: And now, with spacing between words: http://paste.pocoo.org/raw/162140/

Hmm.

Congratulations on correctly locating the coin!

We've been experiencing some technical difficulties and, unfortunately, cannot issue prizes at this time. If you would like a chance at a prize, please check back later today or tomorrow.

I just received this email:

Dear [Callahad],

Congratulations on locating the coin and thanks so much for visiting the site. I AM THE COIN is a collaboration between artist Micah Lexier, writer Derek McCormack and a dedicated crew of craftspeople who all worked very hard toward producing this year-long installation. In the first few days we have had a flurry of activity on the website, including numerous people who wrote to redeem the FIND THE COIN prize.

We hope we have not overstated the prize, which consists of one of the extra tokens from the installation. It is meant as a symbolic thank you to those who took the time to interact with the project. The site also caught the attention of a group who just looked at the computer code rather than read the story.

We are happy to honour the contest and send you the prize token, but before we do so we wanted to confirm that you do in fact want the prize sent to you. We only have 100 prizes to award and we want to make sure we are sending them to those who wish to have a token of their interaction with this artwork.

Please write us back by JANUARY 11, 2010 to confirm that you would like the prize sent to you. If we do not hear back from you we will assume that you are fine with not receiving the prize.

Thanks so much for your time.

That was easy....too easy. I am starting to think this was a hoax to get my info. So I did not submit my info....

http://iamthecoin.com/prize_redemption.php

yeah, gotta love easy to solve riddles by looking in the js

The question, then, becomes whether or not it is ethical to claim the prize on offer...

I...couldn't resist. I am sure there is a way they could have made this more difficult, say, doing the lookup server-side.

The clue flat out tells you which letter it is. Actually solving the puzzle is easier than looking at the js.

Ajax please.

The answer is in the script.

I just saw a link in the HTML.

You could also read the vertical text if you want to think ever so slightly less outside the box ;)

My box is warm and cozy, thank you very much.

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