This puzzle is very strange. If it's for measuring the world's brute forcing capacity, 161-256 are just a waste (RIPEMD160 entropy is filled by 160, and by all of P2PKH Bitcoin). The puzzle creator could improve the puzzle's utility without bringing in any extra funds from outside - just spend 161-256 across to the unsolved portion 51-160, and roughly treble the puzzle's content density.
If on the other hand there's a pattern to find... well... that's awfully open-ended... can we have a hint or two?
I am the creator.
You are quite right, 161-256 are silly. I honestly just did not think of this. What is especially embarrassing, is this did not occur to me once, in two years. By way of excuse, I was not really thinking much about the puzzle at all.
I will make up for two years of stupidity. I will spend from 161-256 to the unsolved parts, as you suggest. In addition, I intend to add further funds. My aim is to boost the density by a factor of 10, from 0.001*length(key) to 0.01*length(key). Probably in the next few weeks. At any rate, when I next have an extended period of quiet and calm, to construct the new transaction carefully.
A few words about the puzzle. There is no pattern. It is just consecutive keys from a deterministic wallet (masked with leading 000...0001 to set difficulty). It is simply a crude measuring instrument, of the cracking strength of the community.
Finally, I wish to express appreciation of the efforts of all developers of new cracking tools and technology. The "large bitcoin collider" is especially innovative and interesting!
Ok, so, I'm really hoping someone can help me out here...
I just learned about this puzzle a few weeks ago, and have since been writing scripts to try and find as much of the "pattern" used to generate these keys as possible, because I was convinced (mainly by
this post at first) that there must've been a pattern, given the seemingly perfect incremental nature of the Log2 of each known private key (if you look at the whole number part, ignoring the decimal place)... And also, I think I was influenced by the fact that this is called a puzzle, and a puzzle is supposed to have, you know, clues and things that help you solve it, or at least a logic to it that is "figure-out-able"... But I digress...
Fast forward to yesterday, when I stumbled across the above post... If we assume this person is telling the truth, that they are "the creator" of this puzzle
[1], and that "there is no pattern", and that they simply used "a deterministic wallet" to generate "consecutive keys"... Well, then, I'm stumped...
I mean, first of all, what kind of wallet software can you use to "randomly" generate 256 keys that are all perfectly spaced apart, with Log2 values that just happen to be exactly incremental by one each...? Unless it's a total coincidence that, so far, all the solved keys just happen to have incremental Log2 values, and we'll eventually solve a key that doesn't...? (one which is either a duplicate of the previous one, or skips one whole number entirely, etc)
And then there's the fact that all of the hex values (as strings, minus the leading zeros) all appear to be grouped into groups of 4 by character length...? (e.g. the first 4 hexes are all 1 character long, the next 4 are all 2 characters long, etc...)
I mean, am I wrong that it doesn't seem to me like math with no pattern whatsoever would just happen to work-out that way? Are these "patterns" that I think I'm seeing really more coincidental (and not purposeful) as I imagine them to be? Or is this actually all an artifact of the cryptographic process and the math that powers Bitcoin...? That for Bitcoin to work properly, there is, in fact, some amount of pattern in the chaos?
I'm much more likely to believe that these keys were actually generated by a script (or some process of some sort) written/designed by the person who created this, and that even if they didn't
intend for there to be a pattern, there is one
[2], and so maybe there's more to it that can still be discovered, to help lower the search space of each key even more that we already have... But maybe I only think that because I want there to be a way to solve a puzzle that doesn't actually contain any clues, or have any internal logic, and must simply be brute-forced, a feat that even the LBC has struggled to make very much progress towards...
So, help me out here, what do you think? Are these "patterns" that seem to be "clues" really either just coincidence, or artifacts of the formula and algorithms powering the system...? Or are they real patterns injected by the human who created this puzzle (intentionally or not), and could there be something else in the data that we just haven't noticed yet?
And maybe more importantly, what does a process for generating a puzzle like this even look like? Can you really ask a wallet software for 256 random but evenly spaced private keys, or would you have to script some amount of the process? I feel like if I can reverse engineer the creation process from the currently known data/results, it could help me figure-out if there's more to the pattern, or no pattern at all...
[1] A claim seemingly verified by the fact that the funds
did actually move from the higher wallets to the lower unsolved wallets a few months later... Though of course that doesn't prove that they're the person who actually moved them, but then why would the real creator give this person credibility by doing for them what they promised us they'd do...?
[2] If only because
people are known to be inherently bad at creating real randomness, and often inject patterns into things they make...
