Topic: [puzzle] Work out a 4 word pass phrase and collect 0.1 BTC - Solved! (Read 1281 times)

Awesome congrats 

Quoted in case anyone missed the edit.

BTW I think next time I might have to make it a little bit harder.

The what: "The wild Colonial Boy", which hashes to 4c46256d89e3d5ce17d8ea5aff2b31852bc6d09d293e9c324658d914ead92fc9, which is the Brain Wallet passphrase.

The how: This is what I did to get the answer:

1. A "strain" would understand "strine". I didn't know what this meant, so I googled "strine". It's Aussie slang for Australian.
2. The remaining clue is "wild". So next, I google "wild Australian".
3. Nothing useful comes up, so I look at the remaining clues. "from a song"... so next I googled "wild Australian song".
4. First result was "The Wild Colonial Boy". Tried it, but didn't work. Looked back in the thread... "second word starts with a lower case letter"... Tried "The wild Colonial Boy", and it worked!

This is slightly abbreviated. There were a few detours I took during the sequence of events (the Australian national anthem, "Come along my hearties", etc.).


Indeed. Remember that humans can't remember sequences of arbitrary data well (try memorizing "z,@M!.xaQE"), but can remember procedures. So making up your own procedure can turn a weak brainwallet into a strong one. More exotic procedures include various hashes, concatenation, reversing the phrase, repeating certain words, padding with spaces or punctuation, adding Chinese characters, or anything else you can think of.

BTW I am guessing if the reward was a lot higher then someone might have actually created a bot just to crack it.

Even so by doing something unusual (here I just hashed so probably something a little more exotic would be preferable) - and of course not publishing that information - brainwallets can be made much more secure.

Well what was the answer?!

Yes, indeed. The nationality helped tremendously.

Edit: Transaction has been confirmed, so I'm publishing the answer.

The what: "The wild Colonial Boy", which hashes to 4c46256d89e3d5ce17d8ea5aff2b31852bc6d09d293e9c324658d914ead92fc9, which is the Brain Wallet passphrase.

The how: This is what I did to get the answer:

1. A "strain" would understand "strine". I didn't know what this meant, so I googled "strine". It's Aussie slang for Australian.
2. The remaining clue is "wild". So next, I google "wild Australian".
3. Nothing useful comes up, so I look at the remaining clues. "from a song"... so next I googled "wild Australian song".
4. First result was "The Wild Colonial Boy". Tried it, but didn't work. Looked back in the thread... "second word starts with a lower case letter"... Tried "The wild Colonial Boy", and it worked!

This is slightly abbreviated. There were a few detours I took during the sequence of events (the Australian national anthem, "Come along my hearties", etc.).

Well done!

Was it the last clue that helped out?

Yay, I think I got it. I'm waiting for a block before I publish the answer. Didn't even need to use a bot . And I'm Canadian too. That must've been a lucky guess .

Close but not exactly right - actually if someone has a large text file of song titles then that might really narrow things down with a regex so won't give more info on this now.

I will help out with an earlier clue though and say that a "strain" would understand "strine".

Hence, UCword/LCword/UCword/LCword

Going to sleep now but will continue with more clues when I wake up.

Next clue is "state of origin" (that ties in with the "strain" clue and should narrow down your searching a lot).

It's not a "Captain Obvious" song.

(or perhaps it is - your guess was the first song that I sang publicly and won a prize for doing so)

Hmm, this worked so well I didn't even check it fits all the clues

Reply sent - the "strain" clue is relevant here.

I tried like this, I just PM'd you to be sure whether I'm right or not

Case sensitively could be the issue (hint second word starts with a lower case letter).

I'm sure I got it but I can't make it work

It's old and quite famous (in the "strain" context).

it's a new song or some old famous song?

Edit: L33t post lol