1.1 BTC Puzzle by Phemex - page 2. | Bitcointalksearch.org

Jimmy Wales

member

Activity: 144

Merit: 17

Quote from: pooya87 on February 28, 2020, 11:44:09 PM

Quote from: Flangler on February 28, 2020, 07:07:07 AM

The main idea of this puzzle is to get the Phemex exchange more popular.

that's what i also said on day 1.
but also i am starting to think that this kind of popularity may not end up well for them. specially if my suspicious about how this puzzle is going to be solved came true, i think an anonymous person is going to suddenly move the coins and they will claim that someone has solved the puzzle then release the solution pretending it was possible to solve while that anonymous person was the Phemex owner.

As long as they are releasing the solution, does it really matter whether an anonymous person is sweeping the fund or not? Public has got enough time to solve the puzzle and now we need to know whether the puzzle was really solvable or not. No?

pooya87

legendary

Activity: 3472

Merit: 10611

Quote from: Flangler on February 28, 2020, 07:07:07 AM

The main idea of this puzzle is to get the Phemex exchange more popular.

that's what i also said on day 1.
but also i am starting to think that this kind of popularity may not end up well for them. specially if my suspicious about how this puzzle is going to be solved came true, i think an anonymous person is going to suddenly move the coins and they will claim that someone has solved the puzzle then release the solution pretending it was possible to solve while that anonymous person was the Phemex owner.

AOL

jr. member

Activity: 142

Merit: 4

Quote from: Flangler on February 28, 2020, 07:07:07 AM

Quote from: o_e_l_e_o on February 24, 2020, 03:56:37 AM

Quote from: pooya87 on February 24, 2020, 12:21:15 AM

the hard part is figuring out what the hell this puzzle means and WHAT to try because it is the least clear puzzle i have ever seen and i've seen lots of them.

This. It's not really a puzzle when people are just blindly bruteforcing thousands of potential combinations. The whole point of a puzzle is that there should be logical clues which one can follow to reach the intended outcome. There was zero way to know we are meant to convert the words in to a number before he said so on his blog. There was zero way to know we are looking for a 27 digit number before he said so on his blog. And even with the additional "hints" he has released, there is still no logical path from start to finish. There are people on twitter and GitHub who have bruteforced hundreds of thousands of combinations and methods of turning those 4 words in to numbers, and combining those numbers with the 21 digit prime, and turning the result in to a private key. At this point, it is just a guessing game. Somebody might blindly stumble on the right answer, but it will be through sheer luck, not through any logical reasoning.

It's a bad puzzle, and it's only the size of the prize that is keeping people interested.

You just understood the whole idea of this event. The main idea of this puzzle is to get the Phemex exchange more popular. When I showed this puzzle to my friend who is a senior developer he said that the puzzle is probably that hard that you have a miracle to solve. I'm not arguing that it isn't solvable but it requires a tons of free time. Eventually, the puzzle will be solved probably by the person from Phemex and they will split the prize. Seeing how people with extreme knowledge about cryptographic and programming failed I really doubt someone from outside Phemex will solve it.

You can not expect 1.1 BTC to just drop on your lap. Can you?

Flangler

member

Activity: 963

Merit: 57

Quote from: o_e_l_e_o on February 24, 2020, 03:56:37 AM

Quote from: pooya87 on February 24, 2020, 12:21:15 AM

the hard part is figuring out what the hell this puzzle means and WHAT to try because it is the least clear puzzle i have ever seen and i've seen lots of them.

This. It's not really a puzzle when people are just blindly bruteforcing thousands of potential combinations. The whole point of a puzzle is that there should be logical clues which one can follow to reach the intended outcome. There was zero way to know we are meant to convert the words in to a number before he said so on his blog. There was zero way to know we are looking for a 27 digit number before he said so on his blog. And even with the additional "hints" he has released, there is still no logical path from start to finish. There are people on twitter and GitHub who have bruteforced hundreds of thousands of combinations and methods of turning those 4 words in to numbers, and combining those numbers with the 21 digit prime, and turning the result in to a private key. At this point, it is just a guessing game. Somebody might blindly stumble on the right answer, but it will be through sheer luck, not through any logical reasoning.

It's a bad puzzle, and it's only the size of the prize that is keeping people interested.

You just understood the whole idea of this event. The main idea of this puzzle is to get the Phemex exchange more popular. When I showed this puzzle to my friend who is a senior developer he said that the puzzle is probably that hard that you have a miracle to solve. I'm not arguing that it isn't solvable but it requires a tons of free time. Eventually, the puzzle will be solved probably by the person from Phemex and they will split the prize. Seeing how people with extreme knowledge about cryptographic and programming failed I really doubt someone from outside Phemex will solve it.

DutchDemon

jr. member

Activity: 115

Merit: 4

Quote from: 100bitcoin on February 25, 2020, 01:19:14 PM

Phemex has declared that solution to this puzzle will be revealed on 21st of March, 2020. OP has been updated with all the known hints so far, to solve this puzzle.

Good to know that the solution will ultimately be published.

100bitcoin

sr. member

Activity: 861

Merit: 423

Phemex has declared that solution to this puzzle will be revealed on 21st of March, 2020. OP has been updated with all the known hints so far, to solve this puzzle.

chennappa121

member

Activity: 400

Merit: 12

Quote from: o_e_l_e_o on February 24, 2020, 03:56:37 AM

Quote from: pooya87 on February 24, 2020, 12:21:15 AM

the hard part is figuring out what the hell this puzzle means and WHAT to try because it is the least clear puzzle i have ever seen and i've seen lots of them.

This. It's not really a puzzle when people are just blindly bruteforcing thousands of potential combinations. The whole point of a puzzle is that there should be logical clues which one can follow to reach the intended outcome. There was zero way to know we are meant to convert the words in to a number before he said so on his blog. There was zero way to know we are looking for a 27 digit number before he said so on his blog. And even with the additional "hints" he has released, there is still no logical path from start to finish. There are people on twitter and GitHub who have bruteforced hundreds of thousands of combinations and methods of turning those 4 words in to numbers, and combining those numbers with the 21 digit prime, and turning the result in to a private key. At this point, it is just a guessing game. Somebody might blindly stumble on the right answer, but it will be through sheer luck, not through any logical reasoning.

It's a bad puzzle, and it's only the size of the prize that is keeping people interested.

You are right brother what Phemex team has announced hits for puzzle it is not given clear points to all of us because there are many communication gaps are there between puzzle and us so I'm also considering this is very bad puzzle to understand. So no one is going to get solution for that until a Phemex team gives solution for this puzzle.

o_e_l_e_o

legendary

Activity: 2268

Merit: 18775

Quote from: pooya87 on February 24, 2020, 12:21:15 AM

the hard part is figuring out what the hell this puzzle means and WHAT to try because it is the least clear puzzle i have ever seen and i've seen lots of them.

This. It's not really a puzzle when people are just blindly bruteforcing thousands of potential combinations. The whole point of a puzzle is that there should be logical clues which one can follow to reach the intended outcome. There was zero way to know we are meant to convert the words in to a number before he said so on his blog. There was zero way to know we are looking for a 27 digit number before he said so on his blog. And even with the additional "hints" he has released, there is still no logical path from start to finish. There are people on twitter and GitHub who have bruteforced hundreds of thousands of combinations and methods of turning those 4 words in to numbers, and combining those numbers with the 21 digit prime, and turning the result in to a private key. At this point, it is just a guessing game. Somebody might blindly stumble on the right answer, but it will be through sheer luck, not through any logical reasoning.

It's a bad puzzle, and it's only the size of the prize that is keeping people interested.

pooya87

legendary

Activity: 3472

Merit: 10611

Quote from: iluvbitcoins on February 23, 2020, 04:35:36 PM

The biggest problem is it's so time exhausting!
I get plenty of ideas but hashing each number, adding 80bytes, rehashing, converting, importing..
It would be so much easier if there was an automatic way to do this.

that is the easy part and it doesn't really take any more than a couple of seconds to compute thousands of possible cases. read my previous post, i tested about 1920 variations in about 3 seconds. it is not hashing by the way, it is elliptic curve point multiplication then hashing the public key (i did both compressed and uncompressed).
the hard part is figuring out what the hell this puzzle means and WHAT to try because it is the least clear puzzle i have ever seen and i've seen lots of them.

Btchunter3333

full member

Activity: 485

Merit: 102

Ok. so after we found the big integer we need to conver it to private key with this method?

Convert your BigInteger to a byte array of a specific size, then use the first (leftmost) bytes to create a key. For this you need to know the size of the prime p used in DH, as the value needs to be left-padded to represent a key. I would suggest to use standardized DH parameters (or at least make sure that the size of the prime is dividable by Cool

.

Code:

public static byte[] encodeSharedSecret(final BigInteger sharedSecret, final int primeSizeBits) {

    // TODO assignment add additional tests on input

    final int sharedSecretSize = (primeSizeBits + Byte.SIZE - 1) / Byte.SIZE;

    final byte[] signedSharedSecretEncoding = sharedSecret.toByteArray();
    final int signedSharedSecretEncodingLength = signedSharedSecretEncoding.length;

    if (signedSharedSecretEncodingLength == sharedSecretSize) {
        return signedSharedSecretEncoding;
    }

    if (signedSharedSecretEncodingLength == sharedSecretSize + 1) {
        final byte[] sharedSecretEncoding = new byte[sharedSecretSize];
        System.arraycopy(signedSharedSecretEncoding, 1, sharedSecretEncoding, 0, sharedSecretSize);
        return sharedSecretEncoding;
    }

    if (signedSharedSecretEncodingLength < sharedSecretSize) {
        final byte[] sharedSecretEncoding = new byte[sharedSecretSize];
        System.arraycopy(signedSharedSecretEncoding, 0,
                sharedSecretEncoding, sharedSecretSize - signedSharedSecretEncodingLength, signedSharedSecretEncodingLength);
        return sharedSecretEncoding;
    }

    throw new IllegalArgumentException("Shared secret is too big");
}

Or is this wrong?

iluvbitcoins

legendary

Activity: 2198

Merit: 1150

Freedom&Honor

The biggest problem is it's so time exhausting!
I get plenty of ideas but hashing each number, adding 80bytes, rehashing, converting, importing..
It would be so much easier if there was an automatic way to do this.

DaCryptoRaccoon

hero member

Activity: 1241

Merit: 623

OGRaccoon

Quote from: iluvbitcoins on February 23, 2020, 02:19:58 PM

The question is in a very weird format.

'I understand elliptic curve is to be researched and understand by us noobies. But is it required to use to reach the private key?'

So, we're supposed to understand it to get to the key, but not use it?
Though Max hasn't confirmed the first part of his question.

Seems very strange indeed but I would think it would put out a lot of people from the puzzle if it we're calculating the points on the curve with the numbers we have been given.

I wonder if any of the others will be able to spot anything with the numbers that we may be missing. However I do have the feeling it's on the right path.

iluvbitcoins

legendary

Activity: 2198

Merit: 1150

Freedom&Honor

The question is in a very weird format.

'I understand elliptic curve is to be researched and understand by us noobies. But is it required to use to reach the private key?'

So, we're supposed to understand it to get to the key, but not use it?
Though Max hasn't confirmed the first part of his question.

DaCryptoRaccoon

hero member

Activity: 1241

Merit: 623

OGRaccoon

Quote from: iluvbitcoins on February 23, 2020, 12:40:28 PM

Quote from: DaCryptoRaccoon on February 23, 2020, 12:33:14 PM

Quote from: iluvbitcoins on February 23, 2020, 12:01:48 PM

It's repeated exactly 64 times. The number would be
2134373941424350546368757683859091929310811111411812612812916416616823626627529 2293295298331334335337343345357368369396417427464468485499555579596621649671703 722788812839853963

But it can't be it

Quote

4. The next step involves converting some words from the portrait, without I/O, into a 27-digit number

We would completely skip the step.

Could it be we need the two numbers one above and the 2nd one to combine them to get the big int

I have a feeling those number will be part of it the repetitions and values are no-coincidence in my view.

Lets say we have to take this large BIG and the Small from the next part and create the key that would point to some logic towards the puzzle.

64 repetitions is indeed an interesting coincidence.

I'm unsure what we could do with so many digits. There's already 178 in that number.
I imagined we could Base58Check, but there's plenty of numbers over 58, so that's not an option.

I think this puzzle has something to do with a brain wallet but not depending on words but rather numbers seem more likely I did notice someone has created a github with some tool for the puzzle

https://github.com/olalonde/phemex-puzzle

I have not tested this yet so if you use it make sure its in a VM or VPS setting as I cannot verify the authenticity of the code yet but from what I see it seems to have a lot of the stuff people are talking about in the topic.

I do believe that the above number or one of the numbers from the table I posted is going to be relevant I don't have much time at the moment to really get stuck into this one but I will keep on posting anything I find along the way.

I think the next step is to look into the possibly of brianwallet's with numbers and maybe words I think my guess about it being elliptic curve's on finite fields may be off course after seeing this post in the git..

https://github.com/olalonde/phemex-puzzle/issues/6

iluvbitcoins

legendary

Activity: 2198

Merit: 1150

Freedom&Honor

Quote from: DaCryptoRaccoon on February 23, 2020, 12:33:14 PM

Quote from: iluvbitcoins on February 23, 2020, 12:01:48 PM

It's repeated exactly 64 times. The number would be
2134373941424350546368757683859091929310811111411812612812916416616823626627529 2293295298331334335337343345357368369396417427464468485499555579596621649671703 722788812839853963

But it can't be it

Quote

4. The next step involves converting some words from the portrait, without I/O, into a 27-digit number

We would completely skip the step.

Could it be we need the two numbers one above and the 2nd one to combine them to get the big int

I have a feeling those number will be part of it the repetitions and values are no-coincidence in my view.

Lets say we have to take this large BIG and the Small from the next part and create the key that would point to some logic towards the puzzle.

64 repetitions is indeed an interesting coincidence.

I'm unsure what we could do with so many digits. There's already 178 in that number.
I imagined we could Base58Check, but there's plenty of numbers over 58, so that's not an option.

DaCryptoRaccoon

hero member

Activity: 1241

Merit: 623

OGRaccoon

Quote from: iluvbitcoins on February 23, 2020, 12:01:48 PM

It's repeated exactly 64 times. The number would be
2134373941424350546368757683859091929310811111411812612812916416616823626627529 2293295298331334335337343345357368369396417427464468485499555579596621649671703 722788812839853963

But it can't be it

Quote

4. The next step involves converting some words from the portrait, without I/O, into a 27-digit number

We would completely skip the step.

Could it be we need the two numbers one above and the 2nd one to combine them to get the big int

I have a feeling those number will be part of it the repetitions and values are no-coincidence in my view.

Lets say we have to take this large BIG and the Small from the next part and create the key that would point to some logic towards the puzzle.

iluvbitcoins

legendary

Activity: 2198

Merit: 1150

Freedom&Honor

It's repeated exactly 64 times. The number would be
2134373941424350546368757683859091929310811111411812612812916416616823626627529 2293295298331334335337343345357368369396417427464468485499555579596621649671703 722788812839853963

But it can't be it

Quote

4. The next step involves converting some words from the portrait, without I/O, into a 27-digit number

We would completely skip the step.

DaCryptoRaccoon

hero member

Activity: 1241

Merit: 623

OGRaccoon

Quote from: iluvbitcoins on February 23, 2020, 08:41:17 AM

Quote from: Btchunter3333 on February 22, 2020, 09:36:20 PM

How this image can help to solve puzzle?

https://i.postimg.cc/3xp7RgF7/LB3.jpg

What the fuck is this? Cheesy

--

Maybe we get a small number from the portrait which is actually a big one
https://oeis.org/A137443/b137443.txt

21 957496696762772407663

I was thinking along these lines or maybe we look for a big int in the list that has the desired number included I also checked on the keys.lol with some of the numbers from the clue but no luck.

I then thought about a brain wallet but with the use of the numbers rather than words as an idea.

If your looking on the OEIS database you will find the number "957496696762772407663" seem to replicate in this sequence over and over

It may be well off the mark but could it be possible we are looking for one of the larger numbers with the "957496696762772407663" included ?

iluvbitcoins

legendary

Activity: 2198

Merit: 1150

Freedom&Honor

Quote from: Btchunter3333 on February 22, 2020, 09:36:20 PM

How this image can help to solve puzzle?

https://i.postimg.cc/3xp7RgF7/LB3.jpg

What the fuck is this? Cheesy

--

Maybe we get a small number from the portrait which is actually a big one
https://oeis.org/A137443/b137443.txt

21 957496696762772407663

o_e_l_e_o

legendary

Activity: 2268

Merit: 18775

Quote from: Btchunter3333 on February 22, 2020, 06:43:14 PM

Can someone tell me how to convert bitcoin HEX private key to WIF? if that is the key i will give a tip

Just enter the private key in HEX in either https://www.bitaddress.org/ or https://gobittest.appspot.com/PrivateKey, and they will convert it to WIF for you.

Re-reading the clues, I wonder if there is actually two 27 digit numbers. "Little is big" could refer to converting little words (such as "BTC" and "ETH") in to big (27 digit) numbers, and the clue said it was done twice. The previous clues also say to "go back to step 4 again".

Having said that, two 27 digit numbers and a 21 digit is only 75 digits, which isn't quite the 76 or 77 digits in base10 you need to get 64 characters in base16.

Topic: 1.1 BTC Puzzle by Phemex - page 2. (Read 1865 times)