A US millionaire who buried treasure in the Rockies has offered one main clue • Hacker News Board

Re: A US millionaire who buried treasure in the Rockies has offered one main clue

#41

Post by markbnj » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 5:43 PM UTC

patio11 wrote: post #25

markbnj wrote: post #11

Interesting to consider what you would do if you found it? Presumably you're in the wilderness with a 40 pound chest. Your car might be fairly near, as Fenn makes clear when he notes he was 80 when he made "two trips from my vehicle" to the site. So if you're fit or have help you can probably get it back to the car (40 pounds is a lot to carry in hiking terrain). What happens once you do? How do you claim title to it…

It's abandoned property, where the only person with a colorable claim obviously, publicly, notoriously, and intentionally relinquished it. It will depend a little bit on the laws of the state where it is found, but in general, if you find it, it is yours. When you attempt to sell bits of it, dealers in e.g. gold coins might ask you the provenance, and then you say "It was the Fenn horde", and you probably show the ph…

I'm not a lawyer, however I know that anything of value like this that is found on public land can have some complications, and if the land is private that's another whole ball of wax. If it is Fenn's land and he's living still, no problem obviously. If it's not his land and his other statements are true then the landowner doesn't know it's there.

Re: A US millionaire who buried treasure in the Rockies has offered one main clue

#42

Post by WhompingWindows » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 5:44 PM UTC

mburst wrote: post #16

I've followed this treasure for a few years now and while I think a modern day treasure hunt sounds exciting, I don't think there is any physical treasure here. The treasure you find on this hunt is the emotional bond you form between your family and friends while enjoying the great outdoors

This comment was sponsored by the National Parks of America

Re: A US millionaire who buried treasure in the Rockies has offered one main clue

#43

Post by lerie82 » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 5:46 PM UTC

hint; there is no treasure.

Re: A US millionaire who buried treasure in the Rockies has offered one main clue

#44

Post by dyarosla » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 5:50 PM UTC

triviatise wrote: post #40

it goes to show like the netflix prize, x prize etc. Is that contests cause 10X the investment of time, energy, and money as compared to the prize. The expected value on these contests is very low. Instead of government grants, we should have government X prizes for solving various problems. Solar for under $x/watt, fuel efficient vehicles, etc etc.

This is an interesting proposition in how to effectively allocate funds in a way that brings in far more value than direct application.

For me it does raise a few questions: What happens to teams who lose a competition? If their only monetary incentive is the govt prize, are they then in the hole financially? Can non winning projects incentivized by govt xprizes always be repurposed to still have value? Will individuals burn out or be emotionally drained and forfeit future competitions?

This is not to say that the idea isn’t interesting; clearly x prizes are still ongoing and there’s never a shortage of interest to participate.

Re: A US millionaire who buried treasure in the Rockies has offered one main clue

#45

Post by stephengillie » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 5:54 PM UTC

triviatise wrote: post #40

it goes to show like the netflix prize, x prize etc. Is that contests cause 10X the investment of time, energy, and money as compared to the prize. The expected value on these contests is very low. Instead of government grants, we should have government X prizes for solving various problems. Solar for under $x/watt, fuel efficient vehicles, etc etc.

> ...may be a hidden treasure chest whose contents are worth millions.

In a way, the startup scene is a type of X Prize contest for capitalism. How many millions would this chest potentially hold? With the amount of time and effort needed to find it, the endeavor arguably provides worse ROI than attempting to start your own business. The level of effort and probability of success might be better for entrepreneurship as well.

Re: A US millionaire who buried treasure in the Rockies has offered one main clue

#46

Post by solarkraft » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 6:10 PM UTC

TrainedMonkey wrote: post #19

trhaynes wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or he assumes people will tell him when they find it?

Or he has access to aerial surveys that indicate that there was no digging at the site. Or the treasure is of the form "take this letter to the bank in order to get your reward". Or maybe he is confident it is not found because it can't be found because it is a hoax.

GPS tracking? Some kind of tamper-detection with a sender? At his budget he could be communicating through satellites.

Re: A US millionaire who buried treasure in the Rockies has offered one main clue

#47

Post by pavel_lishin » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 6:12 PM UTC

piokuc wrote: post #29

analogmemory wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I for sure would not tell anyone about it.

And let the other people spend their time in fruitless search forever? Not very nice.

That's an argument you ought to bring up to Mr. Fenn - since it appears that an eternal search was more or less what he was going for:

> He has also affirmed that hiding the treasure in the first place was largely about encouraging families to enjoy the outdoors. “I wanted to give the kids something to do,” he said. “They spend too much time in the game room or playing with their little hand-held texting machines. I hope parents will take their children camping and hiking in the Rocky Mountains. I hope they will fish, look for fossils, turn rotten logs over to see what’s under them, and look for my treasure.”

Re: A US millionaire who buried treasure in the Rockies has offered one main clue

#48

Post by Phlarp » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 6:13 PM UTC

walrus01 wrote: post #27

markbnj wrote: post #11

Interesting to consider what you would do if you found it? Presumably you're in the wilderness with a 40 pound chest. Your car might be fairly near, as Fenn makes clear when he notes he was 80 when he made "two trips from my vehicle" to the site. So if you're fit or have help you can probably get it back to the car (40 pounds is a lot to carry in hiking terrain). What happens once you do? How do you claim title to it…

1) Mark the location by GPS coordinates, write it down in a few safe places, get back to civilization and make a plan 2) Hike out the hoard in several batches 3) If you are a particularly paranoid sort of person, unless the coins are worth significantly more by their rarity value, buy a $2000 furnace and crucible and melt them down into bars. Sell the bars at a slight loss below the value of 99.999% purity.

This is not how physical gold works. My understanding is that it's tightly regulated with unique identifiers for all ingots, bars, etc and the ownership of each being recorded so there is an audit trail if a diluted bar or ingot is found later. I assume freshly mined gold has to go through some type of formal lab validation / certification for purity that puts it into this identification scheme. I expect nobody will touch your homebrew gold bars lacking this identification, even at a steep discount, worse still for you, these unofficial gold bars are even easier to track and trace due to lacking official serial numbers and certification.

All of this isn't to say you couldn't "find a way" to get spendable money out of finding this stash, more so a question of staying on the right side of money laundering and taxation laws while doing so.

Re: A US millionaire who buried treasure in the Rockies has offered one main clue

#49

Post by djrogers » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 6:15 PM UTC

giarc wrote: post #5

gbenzzz wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the guy has stated recently that it remains unfound.

He also claims to be the only person to know the location, therefore for him to verify that, he would have had to visit it himself. He's now 86 and probably not able to hike into the mountains to check. So perhaps it's not far from a road?

He was 80 when he hauled a 40lb chest from his car to the hiding place, so presumably he could visit it now.

Re: A US millionaire who buried treasure in the Rockies has offered one main clue

#50

Post by pavel_lishin » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 6:17 PM UTC

cryptoz wrote: post #6

> all artefacts that Fenn, a self-taught archaeologist, amassed during his own sometimes controversial explorations in the Southwest, reports Vox. The millionaire was criticised in the 1990s for excavating the San Lazaro Pueblo Indian site he bought, for example, and the FBI searched his home in 2009 in connection with the sale of artefacts looted from the Four Corners area, though no charges were filed. It sounds li…

What about your chances of dying while not spending your time outdoors, in one of the most beautiful parts of the United States?

A man died walking down the street in New York because a piece of fire escape fell off and hit him in the head. I wonder if he'd rather have died in the wilderness, if he were given the chance.