Topic: ARG Puzzle with 3.5 BTC Private Key Prize, Game Over - page 110. (Read 99514 times)

the artist is a woman

Why the reference to a "she"? Who are you calling "she"?

A couple of thoughts:

1.  Here is another awesome painting by coin_artist (of Andreas Antonopoulos); it appeared in a recent article in Bitcoin Magazine: http://bitcoinmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/aantop_border-498x620.png. She's definitely thinking in 1's and 0's.

2. We know she communicates with us via the blockchain, primarily from 1BoRHtJva2L9YyqB1aS1zqgFUjjftNuZtJ but she could also be sending from other addresses.

It's interesting (and important for guidance or her response to our guessing) to watch the communication via https://blockchain.info/address/1HXUobwcB19cGDrghuh42HDdJdJvrJUEra?offset=0&filter=0

Yesterday she sent amounts starting at .023 btc, then .022, then .021...counting down to .013. Then stopped. When a poster cleverly asked for help in his bitcoin addresses on the blockchain: "what do the red and green dots mean," her amounts counted down again, from .012 to .001. [She left out .008, .005, .003--could have been purposely or problems in sending.] Then .023, then .001, as if to reiterate or make clear.

Later today she sent .005 (perhaps because she had meant to send .005 yesterday but not sure [not sure of anything!].)

There are 23 rows in the grid. Is she implying that we need to read the dots (or the text?) from bottom to top (from 23 to 1)? We are behind the looking glass, after all. There could be some reversals, as many have surmised.

Heh, had the exact same idea yesterday.

Been trying some traversal strategies, treating the dots as directions (with blue as the start), and then collecting whatever letters I pass over. Most of them hit endless loops quickly, and all the ones I tried eventually do. This one went further than most before hitting a loop:

blue: right
red: left
green: down
yellow: up

Starting with the blue and using those rules, I get a path like this: http://imgur.com/8SKHIQU which crosses these characters: 3F9aAi

That doesn't seem to contain any useful information and doesn't work as a string on the sites that do take strings that short... not sure if this sort of thing is the right direction or yet another rathole.

I've read through most of the thread, but not all.  So if this has been disscused, I applogies.

I've taken the CSV values and put in Excel with conditional formatting.  Then horizontally flipped LHS over the RHS and change the opacity.  A visual XOR i guess.

Yields a few "intresting" results and adds more dimensions, like cells containing

!!
!@
!#

and so on.  "doubles" could mean something, like cells that contain double letter pairs
5,3 = Hw
5,6 = hr
3,7 Jc

Cant post the image from work

stray thoughts:

If we read the dots as some sort of bitstream vertically, we no longer have yellows that are directly adjacent to each other. This might imply that vertical is a better way to go for the dots if we assume yellows are delimiters of some kind.

Steganography is still a possibility. Cicada 3301 used imgur for at least some images, and the hidden messages were not stripped. I tested the tool used in that game (outguess) on our image and didn't find anything useful. The fact that imgur doesn't strip does mean that it's possible that a different tool may have been used to insert a hidden message, or that outguess was used along with a key. I tested a few possible keys from the character string but did not test anything exhaustively. I doubt this is a useful direction to continue going in unless we get a hint leading us this way.

ryanAC: pretty color dot isolates! here's a complimentary, less-pretty, letters-only:

imgur blocked at work

Here are the colored dots isolated.... don't know if this leads to any ideas, but you never know...

http://imgur.com/I7XkBQh
http://imgur.com/IkwAS9X
http://imgur.com/6pQfAHe
http://imgur.com/3peQPye
http://imgur.com/ZiBZEAv

1BoRHtJva2L9YyqB1aS1zqgFUjjftNuZtJ you "missed" a 0.005 there......

EDIT: and a 0.003.... short of "coins"?

5,3-53, hmmmmm

Ohhhh yes....

I have been going off of the idea that the next phase is going to be a redirection to a video, another image, or a random website.  This is what I think the next step is going to be some sort of transposition on the remaining plain text alpha numeric and/or decoding of the dots.  I have been trying to reverse engineer the process in creating the drawing.  thinking about what I would have control over to change that would still allow the drawing to maintain integrity and coherence.  The things I would not have a problem changing would be letters/numbers, and location of dots and possibly an embedded message in the background colors... this is a really fun puzzle.

Note the title of the reddit post she created to point here: http://www.reddit.com/r/ARG/comments/28vxuj/new_arg_bitcoin_private_key_is_the_prize_shared/. Specifically the phrase "Shared start point". So I don't think a private key is embedded in the image.

Not only the dots, but I have my suspicions when it comes to the characters being spaced out instead of all together:

1) The number of of dots in between is meaningful. The cells overlapped by the figures still clearly show if they have a dot or not, so the number of dots seems to be very important.

2) In addition to the plaintext address being there, left-to-right, a clever riddlerer could have weaved it with a top-to-bottom (or diagonal, or other traversal pattern) message, incorporating the characters from the address to another message.

nice summary, it made me think about
3, 5, 8, 13 (the countdownpause tonight)

fibonacci code? Not sure if thats working with the yellow and blue dot(s).

Will read into that tomorrow and try to work it on the dots.

moinen: thanks for your previous summary, it helped get me started!


I suspect dots to be the next step. We already have a plaintext message in the characters, so I am wondering if the dots will inform us how to decode the rest of the characters in some meaningful way. Or are in fact some sort of binary message. Or something.


I've done quite a bit with them right to left, but not top to bottom or diagonally. Top to bottom or bottom to top may be very promising. I also think there's possible rainbow-shaped traversals given the shape of the data set.


I've thought about that as well, and whether there's an embedded maze. Also, I've been thinking about traffic lights, i.e., red=stop, yellow=slow, green=go. I haven't really gotten anywhere on either of those fronts - there don't seem to be any clear uninterrupted paths..


That is a possibility. However, it also happens to be the dark wallet logo. IMO the upper left corner of the triangle points directly at the blue dot as a clue, others here think it doesn't point exactly at that.

As a side note, I spent a bit of time refreshing on morse code and I suspect it's a nonstarter. Morse isn't binary - pauses are an important component to know when a letter ends. Normal letters can be anywhere between 1-4 dots and dashes, numbers, symbols, and special characters can be up to 6.

Given that we see sequences of multiple red, green, and yellow dots in a row, none of them seems like a good candidate to be a delimiter for morse. If we look at just reds and greens, for example, we wouldn't be able to tell the difference between ETE (./-/.) and R (.-.). This quickly wanders into inelegant brute force territory.

Why that triangle is downward?  Is that a indication to start from the bottom to top?

Has anyone considered reading the dots from top to bottom, right to left or even diagonally?

Also I was thinking, could the blue dot be a starting point and the yellow dots signify some sort of change in reading direction?

I haven't spent much time with this but just thought I'd throw those ideas out there.

Thank you for a great summary.

All good points! I agree.

At this point, I'm the most intrigued as well as perplexed by the transactions, however I think the order of likelihood of meaningfulness is 1. rest of the text in the image, 2. dots, 3. transactions.