Comment by janalsncm

Feels like the central controversy is that Sanborn has to auction anything off for medical reasons.

Make the auction include the physical piece of art itself. Then you're buying a tangible and transferable asset. I think the CIA has enough money it can endeavor to replace it. What value does a cracked puzzle even have to them?

Honestly, everything about this is really sad. I, like may of you guys, have followed this thing for years, for many others, decades.

Actual decryption effort group didn't get to decrypt (a small but faithful community), the creator needed the money for medical procedures that he really believed was coming in. The solution feels like we all go cheated out of something. Lawyers are now involved and the value of the solution is rapidly plummeting.

No one's winning because of a small mistake.

Do I understand part of the complexity of the situation is that Kryptos is in some sense "crackable" (unlike real cryptography), and these two people sleuthed their way to the answer book without solving it? Which is not quite exactly the same thing as them independently working out a solution; it's more like a nicer and more legal version of breaking into the guy's house and stealing it out of his desk drawer?

Here, I’ll give you this one for free: it’s called tortious interference. As the name suggests, it’s a tort, so you don’t need to sign a contact to be liable.