Mr. Sanborn has spent years answering tens of thousands of emails from people who believe they have cracked the puzzle. About 10 years ago, he started charging people $50 for a “short personal response” to emails in order to weed out most of the guesses.
“What can I say? I’m tired of it,” he said in an interview, adding an expletive before “tired.”
Do people with the money to afford such frivolous purchases actually read random Reddit posts? It’s more likely OP is a karma-farming bot; check their history and it’s full of posts like this.
Reddit is a source for a lot of semi -news sources. So popular here, it will appear there. They in turn influence big news media.
A bit like OP is definitely something that would be used to stir up interest in a sale. I bet it is part of a marketing firm used by the auction house.
When is the last time you’ve seen someone post about an item that is going to be sold at Sotheby's? And I don’t count the Banksy piece because it only went viral after the fact, not before.
The people with the funds to buy this item are likely aware of the auction through different means. That’s not to say that auction houses don’t have marketing, but they probably use different methods like paying art or antiquities brokers to recommend items.
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u/TripCruise 3d ago edited 3d ago
I thought I read recently that they planned to auction off the final code?
Edit: Yep! NYT Article link (paywall)
A Solution to the C.I.A.’s ‘Kryptos’ Sculpture Goes Up for Auction - The New York Times
Exerpt:
Mr. Sanborn has spent years answering tens of thousands of emails from people who believe they have cracked the puzzle. About 10 years ago, he started charging people $50 for a “short personal response” to emails in order to weed out most of the guesses.
“What can I say? I’m tired of it,” he said in an interview, adding an expletive before “tired.”