He invested $50,000 in Bitcoin at $125 and used his profits to launch a $2 million treasure hunt: ‘I've always had a spirit of adventure'

As a kid growing up in "the boondocks" of North Carolina, Jon Collins-Black was fond of digging in the dirt to look for rocks and arrowheads. 

With an active emerald mine not too far from where he lived, Collins-Black was drawn to the idea of finding something of value hidden away, just out of sight. 

"I've always had a spirit of adventure," Collins-Black tells CNBC Make It. "I've always been looking for stuff." 

So it should come as no surprise that Collins-Black is the man behind the the world's latest treasure hunt, having hidden chests full of millions of dollars worth of gold, crypto and rare valuables across the United States. 

He first struck gold – metaphorically speaking – back in 2013 when he invested $50,000 in Bitcoin at the price of $125. A little over a decade later, a single bitcoin is now worth more than $100,000. That windfall gave him the financial freedom to spend his time how we wanted.

"I kind of had this niggling idea of, 'What's stopping me from doing my own treasure hunt?'" he says. "And it was like, 'Nothing. In fact, I have the financial means to do it. I can do it however I want to.'" 

Having once been a treasure-hunter himself — trying in vain to find the gold hidden by Forrest Fenn in 2010 — Collins-Black set out to assemble five chests and hide them across the country. 

"I grossly underestimated the time it would take me," he says. "At the time I was like 'Oh, I could probably pull this off in 18 months.' And now it's almost five years later." 

Collins-Black spent roughly two million dollars obtaining the valuables, which include multiple bitcoin, plenty of gold, a rare, holographic Pokémon card and a glass once owned by George Washington. 

He wanted to put together prizes that would inspire treasure hunters to go all-out to find them, but not valuable enough that anyone would put their safety at risk. Five people lost their lives while searching for Forrest Fenn's treasure before it was eventually found.

"There was a question in my mind about how much I should spend on the treasure, because I didn't want to make it too crazy," he explains. "I knew from the Forrest Fenn experience that people can get a little excited, sometimes too excited, and they can make bad decisions as a consequence."

He would go on to hike hundreds of miles across the country finding the perfect hiding spots for his treasures. Collins-Black details the contents of the five chests— and the clues hunters will need to find them — in his new book, "There's Treasure Inside."

Collins-Black doesn't know how long it will take treasure seekers to find what he's hidden, but he "deliberately picked items that I think are going to go up in value" over time as people keep looking. 

"My thinking was: If it takes five years to find these treasures, it's going to be worth more then," he says. "So maybe some people stopped looking because they gave up, but other people are going to be even more motivated because they're looking for a $3 million or $4 million or $5 million treasure."

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