Digging up Treasure in Gold Bugs Past

This panel brings together the people who write Gold Bug, the puzzle contest run by the Crypto Privacy Village, and members of Shagworm, the team that won last year. The contest is a chain of puzzles whose answers feed a final meta puzzle, mixing classical ciphers, steganography and deliberate misdirection. The organizers say some frustration is intended, and they describe how hints are released through Mastodon and Discord, with private team threads for groups that get stuck.

The middle of the session walks through standout puzzles from last year's treasure-hunt theme. A dice-shaking puzzle turned out to be Morse code hidden behind distracting numbers. A flower puzzle led to a Gromark-style cipher, and a rum-bottle song needed code to test many mappings. A color-filter puzzle layered Braille across RGB channels. The winners describe how a wrong starting point and a misread hint slowed the meta, which was finally cracked by plotting a route across the map and reading the first letters of the cities. They also admit to a wrong file version going live.

The closing segment covers this year's art-show theme, where most puzzles are physical pieces on display at the village. The practical takeaways are to first work out where the information is hiding, to treat odd details as potential clues, and to expect to get stuck and use hints when needed.