A bitcoin prize was encrypted into human DNA DNA, the building blocks and foundational structure of life itself, can store computer data by translating information into sequences of its four chemical letters. In January of 2015, geneticist Nick Goldman distributed tubes of synthetic DNA at Davos. The encoded files included the private key to 1 bitcoin. Participants had three years to sequence the DNA and recover it. Belgian doctoral student Sander Wuyts solved the challenge shortly before the January 2018 deadline. His first attempts failed because of an erroneous line in his decoding program, but removing it produced the files and the spendable key.