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I was wondering if anyone ever came across a situation where a wallet.dat file was encoded into an image like a .jpg?

I have this wacky idea of taking a wallet.dat file and somehow encoding it into an image. For example, you would like at a painting, but in the lower right corner, there would be a bunch of encoded jibberish out of which one could reconstruct the wallet.dat file?

Did anyone come across something like this before? How would one do this?

I'm wondering how to translate a wallet.dat into some kind of an image.

user109392
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    Do you mean encoding a private key in the image, or steganography? There are a few similar ideas mentioned in the following news articles: https://www.coindesk.com/theres-more-money-to-win-in-the-310-bitcoin-challenge-heres-some-hints, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/kzpqzz/heres-the-solution-to-the-3-year-old-dollar50000-bitcoin-puzzle, https://bravenewcoin.com/insights/steganography-how-antonopoulos-hid-a-us12m-transaction-in-a-picture-of-kittens – Murch Aug 25 '20 at 08:03

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This is called steganography. Invented in Greece two and a half thousand years ago.

Usually, to make the embedded data inconspicuous the embedded data is distributed throughout the whole image as small variations in hue or luminance etc.

People viewing an image would notice an ugly and obvious rectangular patch in a corner. Especially as wallet data might result in noticeable patterns within that patch when interpreted as image data.

RedGrittyBrick
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