In place of today’s Weekly Canvas, please enjoy an updated version of this incredible true story illustrated by FractalEncrypt in collaboration with AI, as the previous one had an incorrect slide inserted (#13), our apologies!
In addition, we wanted to share the intensive process FractalEncrypt used to create this work, in his own words.
What would you do if you found the private key to an address holding 250 BTC? By FractalEncrypt
Join us for the first ever Tales From The Timechain, where we answer what one of us did. This is a true cypherpunk story exploring the early archaeology of Bitcoin.
Featuring my man HodlTarantula as the anonymous miner "Chuck" because he's perfect for the part! (likeness used without permission).
All art made using GeminiApp 3.1 Pro. For those who want to learn more behind the story, keep reading. If you want to read the story right away, just scroll down!
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This is an adaptation of a talk by a security researcher named Ryan Castelluci, given at DEFCON 23 (2015). You can still watch the presentation today on YouTube.
I also did my own blockchain archaeology, found all the relevant wallets from his talk and verified the evidence on-chain, myself. See source notes for the addresses and on-chain data.
I came across this topic while researching how to add a security feature called anti-exfil to DIY bitcoin signing devices and coordinator software (SeedSigner, SparrowWallet selfcustodykrux (also Kern), Nunchuk, Bull Bitcoin – and shoutout to BitcoinShooter for getting it working on Blockstream Jade – now we're teaming up!), and while working on that, I wanted to dig deep into the types of attacks it helps prevent.
This sent me down a long rabbit hole, ECDSA failures, reused/predictable nonces, Dark Skippy to "The Curious Case of the half-Half Nonces", and then to this story – about brainwallets, as almost a footnote in the half-half story…
So I'm starting here, it's the easiest one to tackle, and I'm hoping to learn this well enough that I can explain it clearly…here's hoping.
The comic panels aren't perfect, it's AI, and I did this relatively quickly, so I can move onto the deeper levels of this project.
To create the script, I watched Ryan's YouTube presentation about 5 times, downloaded and corrected the transcript, and then made a 12-page sketch of what I hoped to show on each page to detail the story.
I fed that transcript and my 12-page sketch into a BUNCH of models;
– GPT 5.6 Sol Medium – Very bland and boring!
– Gemini 3.1 Pro – Did better, gave some stuff to work with, still not great.
– KimiK3 – now this one did really good! I liked this one the best.
– Deepseek V4 Pro – I accidentally left the Kimi script in the same folder, and it just told me "the script already exists, but I corrected some inconsistencies"…oh well.
In the end I took all 3 scripts and rewrote them into one. Then I kept adjusting it – honestly until the very last page was done, I kept making changes…hope it came out good.
All in – about 1-2 days of research and thinking. 1 day of script wrangling, and then another 2 of generating pages and then fixing individual panels or text boxes. Some fixes I had the AI do, some I had to manually do myself in Illustrator.
[Editor’s note: Fractal has since put in more time improving the art, text and flow to offer the version you see here].
Anyway, this is getting too long – I'll let you get to Page 1 of 12 (now 14)! Enjoy and let me know what you think!
Tales from the Timechain by Fractal Encrypt
We hope you enjoyed this fascinating rendition of a fascinating true story! If you’d like to see more editions of Tales from the Timechain, be sure to let FractalEncrypt know by commenting on his Twitter post here.
Thank you for being on this journey with us.
Onward,
Asanoha
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