In my previous post, I summarized what Hive account@steemclan knows about The Earth Key, The 8th key fragment in the wild and crazy Satoshi's Treasure Hunt. I mentioned that the leading theory for solving the Earth Key requires a tool called ImageMagick. In this post I will share instructions for setting up ImageMagick on popular platforms, and how to use the tool.

ImageMagick is an open source suite of image manipulation tools. The source code repo can be found here: https://github.com/ImageMagick/ImageMagick6

Disclaimer: these tools require some knowledge of operating systems and command line/terminal. If you're strictly a GUI person turn back now.

Installing ImageMagick

Here I will share instructions for 3 different operating systems. Choose your favorite.

Windows Native

1. Download ImageMagick portable version
   1. Direct link: https://imagemagick.org/download/binaries/ImageMagick-7.0.8-53-portable-Q16-x86.zip
   2. Extract somewhere convenient
   3. For extra convenience, add the ImageMagick folder to your path.
      1. Instructions for doing this: https://www.architectryan.com/2018/03/17/add-to-the-path-on-windows-10/
      2. This will make it such that you can run the tools from any folder

WSL (Linux on Windows 10)

1. Enable Windows Subsystem Linux 
   1. Detailed instructions here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10
2. Install Ubuntu from Microsoft Store
   1. Direct link: https://www.microsoft.com/store/productId/9NBLGGH4MSV6
3. Launch Ubuntu
4. Update by running command: sudo apt-get update
5. Install ImageMagick with command: sudo apt-get install imagemagick

MacOS

1. Open Terminal app
2. Install home brew using instructions here: https://brew.sh/
3. Install ImageMagick by running command brew install imagemagick

Quick Test

Now that you have ImageMagick installed, quickly test it by running the command magick -version from your Terminal/PowerShell/cmd prompt.

If all goes well you should see something like:

Version: ImageMagick 7.0.8-53 Q16 x64 2019-07-05 http://www.imagemagick.org

Copyright: Copyright (C) 1999-2018 ImageMagick Studio LLC

License: http://www.imagemagick.org/script/license.php

Visual C++: 180040629

Features: Cipher DPC HDRI OpenCL

Delegates (built-in): bzlib cairo flif freetype gslib heic jng jp2 jpeg lcms lqr lzma openexr pangocairo png ps raw rsvg tiff webp xml zlib

Using ImageMagick

Now that we have the tools up and running we can start attacking quickbrownfox-doll.bmp

The main ImageMagick tool we want to use is convert -decipher. 

The full command syntax looks like this: 

magick convert -region <dimensions of region to decipher> -size <total pixel size of image> <input-file> -decipher <password-file> <output-file>

With this, one can experiment with various regions and passphrases to attempt to decipher the center scrambled region of the Russian doll image seen above.

Conclusion

The Earth Key remains elusive. The tools and parameters we've tried  have failed to uncover the center of the Russian doll. Either our tools,  pass phrases, or parameters are incorrect. Once we find the right  combination, the full image should reveal itself, and we'll move to the  next step. 

In the next post I will explain how to create scripts around ImageMagick to automate guessing.

 Join us on Discord to win Satoshi Tokens for Solving Clues!