I'm not sure how old this information is, but I remember him confirming it still is and also saying that someone once made it within 200 feet of it (I'm not sure how he knows that, I wonder if he has cameras setup there?).
Actually, looking at the wikipedia page [1] for it, it seems to be from August 20, 2016.
>someone once made it within 200 feet of it (I'm not sure how he knows that)
There's at least one forum [1] where people post reports of their search. He's probably just keeping an eye on where people say they've gone looking for it.
It also occurs to me that if you do get to the general location by paddling, as many have speculated, if someone posted or emailed him with the correct put-in spot he would know that they would have passed by the treasure.
The forest on Melee is fixed; you can find the treasure by memorizing its location or by following the map, but there is no guide who will lead you to it. You find the sword master in the same forest by following a guide (or, again, by memorizing her location).
This was an interesting choice, since the hell caverns in the same game are randomized and it's impossible to get through them without the guide.
Assuming the statement is true (and the treasure is real), presumably he visited the area and saw some sort of evidence of people having been digging or otherwise poking around. If that were the case, there's an implication that it's probably relatively accessible to where he lives.
I can't imagine ever telling someone I found it. I don't know the exact tax implications but I imagine it would be a lot like gambling which can be up to a 40% taxation rate. I would quietly take the gold, turn it into cash, and slowly launder the cash and never report it. Heck, I would just pay cash for everything and would probably just spent it naturally over my lifetime like this without bothering to launder. As long as I avoided the kinds of purchases that raise eyebrows, the IRS would never know. My normal salary would just go into savings/investments.
I imagine most people would do this, at least the kinds of people who would hunt $1m lockboxes.
As a side note, I wonder if you can DIY ground penetrating radar light enough to be carried on a drone. Imagine a few drones shooting electromagnetic waves at the ground and waiting for a reflective ping from a metal box. You could probably cover a lot of ground with a few drones running everyday for a few days. If you can figure out how to filter out the false positives, you can probably just find this thing via radar. I imagine an old man doesn't have the ability to dig very deep and this thing might only be a couple feet underground, so within some reasonable sensing specs.
edit after some googling:
Working ground penetrating radar drone for $500 here. Heck, its even FCC legal! Its a IG42-SB4 robot which can drive for 3 hours on stock batteries, so maybe double that battery pack and you get 6 hours of non-stop sensing. Just a few of these should cover every human walkable path in a matter of days, perhaps a couple weeks at most (guesstimate).
Looks like he uses this visualization library from the US Navy. I'm no expert but I imagine something like this would be able to show a treasure chest-like box very easily once you have all the data. Cubes don't exist in nature so once you see something cube-like in your data, go on a hike. If you're clever you can have your drones pipe their data via 4G every five minutes or so, shoot it to your desktop, and look at this data in almost realtime. Or if you're especially clever use CV to look for square-like shapes in the data and to alert you when they pop-up. Now you can tell that drone to go back to double-check and to scan from different angles. If it really, really looks like a cube from different angles, then go on a hike and enjoy your million bucks.
> If you find and keep property that doesn’t belong to you that has been lost or abandoned (treasure trove), it’s taxable to you at its fair market value in the first year it’s your undisputed possession.
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This means that it's just counted as regular income. If you find a few million dollars, that puts you into a pretty damn high tax bracket.
I'd probably just declare it and take the 40% haircut. I got a couple thousand dollars from renting my guest room to a woman who was divorcing her husband, and I've barely touched it. It just sits in a shoebox. Cash is such a pain in the ass to deal with.
The poem makes it sound like it is under a visibly marked blaze, at an eddy in a river or creek that is easily navigable solo with a bare minimum level of strength and skill.
Does GPR detect objects underwater?
Seems like you only need a camera for your drone, looking for man-made markings near waterways.
What if someone found it long ago, not knowing that it was part of a scavenger hunt, and decided to hide their discovery?
Only one of the treasure hunters will find the treasure (or possibly no one will). If people are in it for a profit rather than for the "thrill of the chase" and to enjoy the mountains then they've only themselves to blame when they come away empty-handed. If the treasure is no longer there, for the majority of treasure hunters nothing has changed.
What if someone found it long ago, not knowing that it was part of a scavenger hunt, and decided to hide their discovery?