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Davide
@0xdavide
🧩🔑Have you ever heard of the enigma "The Legend of Satoshi Nakamoto"? A contest published in 2015 that hid a Bitcoin priv key containing 4.87 BTC. The puzzle was created by cryptographer Marguerite in collaboration with visual artist Rob Myers. The image looked like a fantasy artwork but in reality it contained cryptographic elements embedded in the graphics: colors, patterns and hidden numbers. After almost 3 years (2018), the puzzle was solved by an anonymous user thanks to image analysis (to detect binary patterns) and decoding in Base58 (format used for Bitcoin private keys). HOW WAS THE PUZZLE SOLVED? The private key was in "wif" format with "base58" encoding: 1) The private key is hidden in the frame (flame: red, yellow, short, long, narrow, long, purple or green inside. Each represents 0 or 1. Starting from the top, going from left to right you get a sequence of 0 and 1 based on the type of flame).
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Davide
@0xdavide
2) A key character was the red ribbon at the bottom right that formed a 6-bit cipher useful for decoding the information (short red ribbon = 0, the long one = 1). The cipher applies the XOR operator (or exclusive OR) to groups of 6. 3) Convert bits to decimal numbers. 4) ASCII encoding (transforms decimals into letters). 5) Obtain private key with 4.87 BTC. So the operations were to get the bits of all the flames from left to right (in the image there are the first 3 flames), break them down into groups of 6, apply the cipher key for each one (obtained from the red ribbon) that is the XOR operator, add all the binary digits obtained from the XOR operator (long series of 0 and 1), convert the bits into decimal numbers (each group of 8 bits/digits becomes a decimal number: 01000010=66) and use econding ascii (which transforms the numbers into letters, 66=B. The letters make up the private key). Not easy but almost 5 BTC were worth the attempt!
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