Topic: The Legend of Satoshi Nakamato, FINAL STEP PUBLISHED.... 4.87 BTC GRAND PRIZE! - page 49. (Read 108519 times)

we can check the balance from this:
https://blockchain.info/address/1FLAMEN6rq2BqMnkUmsJBqCGWdwgVKcegd
so, try to work hard.
the current rewards is $ 83,691.00. 

In the interest of sparking some discussion/direction thought I'd share one of my early theories. Might help others eliminate solutions.

So to me its clear that the solution from the address is to do with a value (either raw or hashed with SHA-256) that exists in the flames. No big revelations. As mentioned its a vanity address so the private key will be random and wont conform to words/brain seed for priv key.

While there's a lot of noise going on in this image I feel some crucial elements get overlooked, so I try and find approaches that incorporate definite cues. One of these I feel are the meanders (squiggly Versace snakey corner thingys).

I looked at sequences and mapped the eight 'sides' (4 inner, 4 outter) paths and sought to use the meanders or glyphs in the corners of the painting as directional starting from corners. I did this going Clockwise and Counter-Clockwise for a total of 16 'walks' from a corner to a corner

The binary values I took were the characteristics of the flames one at a time eg looking at length where long is 1, and then its inverse for a total of 6 sets (Long 1/0, Short 1/0, Red 1/0, Yellow 1/0)

The meanders  are either CW and CCW and interestingly appears four times but for this I just tested moving CW + CCW and moving CCW + CW for a total of two rotations around the flame path but avoided trying four 'rotations'  because too much.

Given that the meander has 7 sides (of the eight, you'll notice the last inner side is missing ) I took this to be a hint that the missing side could be an indicator to exclude a side from the sequence. Or two. Or none.

So for each meander I test 0 excluded, 1 excluded and 2 sides excluded ie. the none, one or both the right sides of the chess board arent in the sequence for the meander rotation. I'd also twist the meander, changing the sides that are/might be excluded.

To visualise picture the two meanders on the middle of the board. One would be either CW and CCW in direction. I'd start them both so the missing side would exclude the right. Then change the second one to point upwards, then left, then bottom. After one rotation I would change the first meander from the right to the up excluding position and repeat the seconds movements again.

There were other rules I included when starting a path and coming across excluded paths such as dropping to the inner path or skipping but no dice. Anyway might spark a lil summin summin for someone out there.

A big PSA as well Vitalik Buterin's github has some useful tools that will come in handy for converting  this convertin priv keys > wif > address to verify. Google PyBitcoinTools.

If y'all hit the motherlode and this helped, here's my address:

1BZvt43p3qcv6jzJkg4bRsGGpLfX3DXnnM

I have a solving Group going on Discord- Join in to help share some Ideas! https://discord.gg/jEhUQqX

Alot of solo people trying to solve it not sure on any teams but if you wanna trade ideas feel free to msg me.
I was originally looking for the pattern 011010 Because I figured the key would give us are starting point.
I ended up finding one for the outer right starting from top to bottom (inside color) 011010000001   1110010000000001   01110110   111010101101001001   (switch to inside flames) 100000100110111101001011   111100110010001110011101010110000   110111(LEAVES)1110001   0111001011010100001111000100   Unfortunately I could get no useful info from this text also i would like to add that maybe we are dealing with a Caesarian Shift since the image title is 1flamen6 here is a useful link for that http://rumkin.com/tools/cipher/caesar.php

Is there any team still trying to solve this? I would like to join.

OK, I give up for now. I was trying flames length approach once again, but in some cases it's hard to determine is it long or short flame (I really hate right now the way this painting is painted ) And sometimes you don't know is it flame, or branch, should I count it or not

BUT another fact worth notice, maybe it will help someone (I'm too tired and my boss isn't happy too ) - notice that on the outside you have this weird colourless flames. Their number along with colourful flames is... 98 The same as inner flames! That could be something.
Notice also, that those weird colourless flames have one attribute - length. That could lead somewhere.

I give up right now, maybe some time later
Good luck everyone!

PS. I really wonder if the team behind this puzzle test it on someone outside their circle 

Once again sorry for my English, maybe I used wrong word.

When you have classic chess board, you have letters and number which help you determine each tile (such as C2 for example). Now, I was thinking in this picture flames have the same function (group of flames from bottom and group of flames from left identify tile on board).

BUT NO.
2 reasons why not:

1) quality of painting - many times flame is right in the middle between two tiles and you can't tell where it should belong
2) and more important - groups of flame from top/bottom or left/right doesn't match each other when you look at row or column of chess board tiles. You know, in classic chess board you have for example letter D on top and bottom. Here you doesn't have the same group of flames.
So this is dead end

Still trying to decode flames

What do you mean by "Use flames as indexes"? Can you describe by example?

OK, I have to go to sleep (tomorrow is Monday, some of us don't sleep on bitcoins and have to go to work to make a living ) So I don't think I will be able to spend much time on it during week.

BUT I think now that each flame outside board is hex number, they are actually carring 4 bits of information:

length
outside colour
inside colour
and... inside / outside

and that gives us pretty hex number, used in private keys 

But... so what. I was trying to get some info from flames and nothing.

I know for sure, that we can't use flames as indexes to tiles of board, because too many of them are on tiles borders (I hate those brush strokes! ) you simply can't decide which way to go.
Also, it would be great if we know how to index tiles (9x7 but is it 0 to 9 and then A to F or is it 1 to 9 and A to G, or maybe 1 to 7 and A to I or... etc.) So little information!

Now I know why it is not solved for more than 2 years. I would really like to see it's solution, maybe we missed some clue (or it wasn't been given).

Hi there

I have just tried a little bit other way:

We have PIDGEON and PHOENIX -> symbols of LIFE.
We have CHESS -> as Garry Kasparov said "Life imitates chess".
We have BLUE stuff here -> G. Kasparov played versus Deep BLUE computer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Blue_versus_Garry_Kasparov

As we can see there's a lot of chess moves wrote in "algebraic notation". I tried some password combinations basing on moves from year 1996, game 1 and year 1997, game 6, taking into account chessboard shape (7x9) or marked blue region. Anyway, I'm not even sure what's proper form of the private password so... I'm just leaving it here  .

Hello again, I have few minutes (youngest is taking a nap ) [sorry for my English]

I was thinking about that 1FLAMEN6 and this is what I got:

I assume it means 1 flame in 6. We have 6 ribbons on key, they have pattern 011010. When we look at colourful flames outside chess board we notice that only reliable information is their length (1 for long, 0 for short). And now this is important, where I could get wrong, but I was searching for pattern 011010 among flames and I found only one! It's above dove on inner side (where the leaf is).
Now get this. In those 6 flames we have only 1 unique flame!!! Cool!
And... now we have two ways:

• One which I abandoned, that this flame represents value 6. Because its still tell us nothing (110 - to many options to learn anything).
• Second which I choose. This one unique flame (1 flame in 6) represent perfect 1 - all his attributes have value 1 - long, yellow outside and green inside. This could help in getting binary information from flames

Or maybe there is some other way. What do you think?

I think that we have to consider whole flame as information unit, which give us 2³ = 8 variants. We still don't know in which order read length and colours. Also we don't know the order of reading all flames. But in my opinion key is in them. Brute force isn't option (it's heavy, blunt and not elegant).

But! What about the whole board? This weird chess board must contain clues! I'm now focusing on this one (chess)

Let me know what do you think and is it making any sense? If I helped you somehow, please let know and if you get the bounty thanks to this, remember about tip

Don't be so negative. Since you are newbie, try to find out more about Bitcoin. One of the BTC properties is that you can see the amount of the money any address holds, without knowing the private key for that address. Just go to any block explorer, as you can see in the OP, the reward for this puzzle is parked here: https://blockchain.info/address/1FLAMEN6rq2BqMnkUmsJBqCGWdwgVKcegd.

how do we know this hasn't been solved already?

someone manages to figure this out then realises the wallet is empty

If you get lucky, share solution afterwards

Simplest way is to create account on blockchain.info and then Settings -> Adressess -> Import bitcoin address. Then on main screen (dashboard) you choose send, put address of puzzle wallet in From and your wallet in To and... private key. If it is OK, you are good to go.
Good luck and let us know!

(I though I found a clue but it was useless )

Oh, by the way. Doesn't blue colour intrigue you? Chess, blue, maybe IBM Deep Blue ?

Let say the impossible happens and i found some private key.....how can i test it? I have installed Bitcoin Core5.7.1. How and where to put the private key? Step by step please. I'm new in criptocurency. Thank You.

Hello everyone, Polish site wykop.pl brought me here (it's like digg)

Great puzzle, although I enjoy painting I don't like way it is painted (it's very easy to make mistake trying to pull information from it).

We have to many unknows, maybe googling symbols will lead to something.

Flames: only reliable info is length, we don't know what values refer to colours (1 or 0).

I think 6 ribbons on key are important (011010 / 26 / 1a (A1?) )

Also what do you think about 1FLAMEN6 ? "1 flame in 6" (as in 1 flame in every 6) or "1 flame and 6" (which gives us 7)

Also we don't know in what direction read flames and which ones (upper, lower ?)

Does all helixes in corners matter or just only one (bottom left) ?

I also think that board size matters, because its odd (maybe we should focus on odd things)? I think not the number 63 is important (9x7) (or 9+7=16) but board indexes: A1 to I7

Hope it helps. I'd like to see someone solves it, I'm too stupid for it and have no time (2 kids at home ) but it's really interesting. In my opinion we are missing something really obvious which could push everyone on right track.

I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about with these unique leaves. Unique in what way?

this challenge looks amazing,  but its colorful ness makes it difficult for colorblind people, including myself.

are there any clues out there ?

Maybe flames is the *solution*. Look at them, maybe it is a binary layout, 0 or 1. On the left side of the picture you can see 3 leaves (outer chess ground, maybe they hide something e.g. next flames?)
We can notice *10* unique leaves per direction:

N - 10x red/green,
S - 10x yellow/violet:blue,
E - 10x red/violet:blue,
W - 7x red/green or yellow/green + 3 hiden under leaves.

Thank you game master for the high res picture !!!

https://twitter.com/coin_artist/status/938483706607611907

This new tweet give us many information about the puzzle. We now have the answer to the following questions (as I see it).

# 1 The private key is only in the painting or also in the digital file ? There is nothing to extract from the digital file, all the information needed are inside the painting (because we have the .jpg and .tif version of the file). I spent time looking for the DCT coefficients histogram in the jpeg file which is useless, there was nothing strange but I wasn't 100% sure, now I have the answer.

# 2 I had the feeling that some text was hidden in the painting, for example, bottom right of the picture, in the jpeg file you can see a "2" in the Grec symbol. I also had the feeling that some text was hidden in a ray of light coming from the keyhole. Thanks to the .tif file I now know that there is no such text in the picture. The "2" is just a JPEG artifact and the text in the ray of light are just brush stroke. So to answer the question one person had on twitter, I don't think there were details we couldn't see in the .jpg file, just things we could overthink.