Bitcoin Forum

https://img.phemex.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/16082243/satoshipuzzle.png

https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/address/1h8BNZkhsPiu6EKazP19WkGxDw3jHf9aT

Details: https://phemex.com/references/articles/try-to-solve-our-2-btc-puzzle

First Official of Hints (https://phemex.com/references/articles/a-letter-from-max)...

1. The first 21-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e is: 957496696762772407663

2. The private key you derive from Satoshi’s portrait is a big integer, not Wallet Import Format (WIF)

3. The filename of the picture is irrelevant

4. The next step involves converting some words from the portrait, without I/O, into a 27-digit number

5. Go back to step 4) again if you can’t figure it out

Last Official Hint (https://phemex.com/references/articles/the-last-hint-of-phemex-2-1btc-puzzle): After meeting the Phemex team, the Goddess Pheme repeated the words “little is big”, twice within three days.

Community Gathered Hints: https://github.com/olalonde/phemex-puzzle/blob/master/CLUES.md

Solution will be revealed on: 21st of March, 2020.

21 digits prime number... that's a shit ton of options.. i mean, if for 12 digits we have 33,489,857,205 options, then for 21 digits should be a ton of numbers.

I can imagine 2 ways to solve this:

1.- We get all the prime number of 21 digits, and verify them as a brain wallet.

2.- read e while verify 21 digits chains and calculate of the number is a prime number.

By the way, i don't like at all the fact about someone already move BTC on the price addy.

why don't you explain in detail in this thread, I don't really like puzzles, and it seems that the puzzle is difficult to solve, I don't even see any posts that are similar to private keys, only visible face images and some writing, Alright, good luck solving friends' riddles.

It will be very difficult to solve the puzzle  because I was trying more than three days now with my own methods. but still I am not able to find solution, and still nobody can claim that because first 21 digits prime number found in consecutive digits of e, it is really very big numbers maybe somebody going to resolve this puzzle soon and I am still in the hunting process.

That fact that you don't like puzzles, then why someone needs to explain to you the details here? You even bother posting on this thread.

And of course, that puzzle is difficult to solve and you have to expect that.

OP gives the link for it and all details are there. Actually, the puzzle is up for about a week now so I think there are people who are in progress now solving that.

Yep, it's a difficult puzzle indeed, commensurate with the rewards.

For everyone, you can follow their official twitter account and see how those trying to solve the puzzle is doing.

https://twitter.com/Phemex_official/status/1217808220703473664

Another brainbreaker, nice :)
Good luck to everyone....2.1btc is a nice reward.

Actually the reward is 1.1BTC and the other 1BTC will go to your exchange's account but will they allow you to withdraw that amount too? The puzzle is complicated and it's one of the hardest.

Good luck to those folks that will solve this puzzle.

Why in the world would it be easy to solve, its 1.1 BTC.

Kind of silly to even comment on this thread if you are not interested.

This is not an easy giveaway. No one would simply let you solve a very easy puzzle with a prize of 1.1 BTC.

The fact that this is a puzzle means this better be challenging or else this is not something the entire community would have fun solving.

To solve this problem :

1)

Download PARI/GP

2)

Calculate e as accurate as you want, even 1 million digits do not take very long. You just have to establish enough memory with allocatemem()

3)
Convert each block of length 21 that does not begin with a 0

with the command isprime(,2) which is a rigorous primality test. The best way is probably to create an array with the digits-command.

4)

The first such block is the answer.

I did not post the full code, but I mentioned the necessary commands. I want to leave a little work to the OP.
source: https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/3513323/what-is-the-first-21-digit-prime-in-consecutive-digits-of-e



Have fun and please consider PM'ing me for the tip payment.

you misread it. it is not prime numbers that have 21 digits, it is a prime number with 21 digits that is found inside digits of e and it is the first consecutive one.
it basically took me a minute to find the first 10k digits (http://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/HistTopics/e_10000.html) and another minute to write a small code and then about a nano second to find the answer. it is also posted by others: 957496696762772407663
it doesn't help though since there is nothing else to continue with!
as i said before, this still looks to me like an advertisement, i don't think it is even solvable. a brand new exchange is not just giving away $17850 and promise lots of $100 rewards!

I can confirm, that it's

957496696762772407663

2.718281828459045235360287471352662497757247093699959574966967627724076630353547 ...

Check my code, but my C-skills are very limited:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5219708.0

It is not unusual to find this number so early in e, since the prime number distribution for small values like 10^21 to 10^22 is still dense.

But what is this number good for?

So far, I have found that the puzzle rounds about the following...

- 957496696762772407663
- Phemex
- BTC/Bitcoin
- ETH/Ethereum
- XRP/Ripple
- Satoshi
- Nakamoto

I guess, following transformations have major role to play to find the HEX private key of 1h8BNZkhsPiu6EKazP19WkGxDw3jHf9aT...

- DEC to HEX (https://www.rapidtables.com/convert/number/decimal-to-hex.html)
- ASCII to HEX (https://www.rapidtables.com/convert/number/ascii-to-hex.html)
- SHA-256 (https://geraintluff.github.io/sha256/)

It is good for the exchange who gets free advertising until someone, someday finds the answer, if there is one. By then, they will probably have profited more than 2 BTC by building their customer base.

They have released the 21 digits prime number with their latest tweet and it says that some hints can be found on their blog.

https://twitter.com/Phemex_official/status/1220426988126687236

https://twitter.com/Phemex_official/status/1220345172015214592

https://phemex.com/references/articles/a-letter-from-max

I think still no one finds the correct answer until now, but there's someone who got the 21 digits prime number. Good luck to those who will try to solved the puzzle.

It's really a good strategy how they put up like this kind of puzzle, it's a good marketing having a 1.1 BTC plus 1 BTC as a bonus that's why they gained so much popularity now, for sure many project will have a marketing strategy like this one.

because one of their goals is certainly the promotion of exchange they have.
we should try first, if one of us wins follow this thread to provide evidence.

If a puzzle is easy to solve it will not be called a puzzle but a question which needs an answer. All puzzles are difficult and when the prize is 1.1 Bitcoin it is bound to be more difficult than normal.

It's a puzzle for math people. Which I'm not. Not really even very fun to observe since I totally don't get what's going on. I know prime numbers. But probably never used one beyond 4 digits.

So I never participate in these kinds of puzzles. Maybe something more accessible would gain more traction. Otherwise you basically are giving away 1.1 BTC or $10k to just a small circle of guys who study math or engineering or whatever.

And miss out all the regular bitcoin users who actually go on exchanges to give you business.

Just my simple non puzzling 2 cents:)

Are you sure it's all about math ? Can be the wrong path.

Puzzle is so difficult to solve trying hard from 3 days. Couldn't find it but still I am trying yes the puzzle is worth 1.1 Bitcoin. One cannot earn so easily. It all depends my my luck what I got or not lets keep trying until it going to end

i honestly wouldn't call this a "puzzle" because a puzzle is when there is some sort of problem that you think about and solve with different hidden clues.
this seems like a brute force attack specially after i read their latest tips, they are basically saying you should try different values (that is brute force) until you find the answer which is far from how a puzzle should work.

The 21 digits to find out isn't enough to solve the puzzle. It's actually the first step and I saw that guy on their twitter that got the correct prime numbers but nothing happened.

I think we will see now a new marketing strategy in the coming years for those exchanges that want to compete with other established ones. And this is going to be through puzzle solving with high hidden prizes.

For someone like me, who wants all the hints to be on this thread. Here we go


Words from the portrait, without I/O
First: 166598323
prime: 541576313
found: 439179574
in: 2423
consecutive: 15425694213501219395
digits: 24100570284
of: 2706
e: 37
XRP: 102334
ETH: 45256
BTC: 35159
Phemex: 14899878097
^source: https://github.com/olalonde/phemex-puzzle

---

BTC, ETH, XRP, Phemex combo gives 27 digit number. So does "first,prime,found" and few others but BTC, ETH, XRP, Phemex makes more sense.

So I assumed the "without I/O" clue was a hint to Base58Check encoding. Given that, if you take "BTCETHXRPPhemex" as a Base58Check string and convert it to Base10, you end up with a 27 digit number.

I took every combination of the words "BTC", "ETH", "XRP", and "Phemex" (24 combinations in total), and converted from Base58Check to Base10.

For every one of these 27-digit numbers (24 in total), I concatenated them before the prime, concatenated after the prime, and multiplied the two together.

For each of these 72 resulting numbers, I tried:
Hashing them with SHA256
Hashing them twice with SHA256 (the "Go back to step 4 again" clue makes me think we have to do something twice)
Converting them to HEX, then hashing them

I used each of the 216 results as a private key and checked the addresses. No luck.

I'm out of ideas at this point. Going to have to wait for another hint.

What does "without I/O" mean in relation to the puzzle?

It, most likely, indicates Base58, which is by definition without I/O.

I/O specially written this ways refers to Input/Output (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input/output) protocol in communication protocols. not to mention that base58 is also missing zero and lower case letter L.
by the way "Base58Check" suggests a checksum in the strings which i don't think any variation satisfied that.

Base58 could be correct clue as "without I/O" is exactly without I, O, l and 0 because I looks like l and O looks like 0

I can try this one.

I will be trying the tip of the first member who posted here. Might win a 1.1 BTC but I think, and I know for sure that there will be someone who can answer this quickly.

Edit : Been reading the discoveries of other members and I am really confused that they include number 9 and number 6 as a prime number. They are composite, not prime.

Lol  ;D 6 and 9 are digits :) But they were asked for prime number consisted from 21 digit! For example, number 269 is a prime number but includes digits 6 and 9 as well  ;)

Thanks for that explanation.

I already get it when I saw this site where the value of e is so many I spent my time looking for it. It is grouped so that is how I already get it. Keep on posting hints/tips though, thank you.

Over a week passed, any new clues, hope, or updates?

Hello,

This puzzles are really good, I spent a lot of time with trying to solve but without a positive results yet.

I want to share one of my point of view that You can use to solve this riddle by yourself;

1. Open -> https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/convert-sentence-equivalent-mobile-numeric-keypad-sequence/

2. Scroll down and at the bottom look for section "48" in C++ with "string input" and remove this word "GEEKSFORGEEKS"

3. Between " " put Your random words e.g "PHEMEXBTCETHXRP" OR "ETCPHEMEXBTCXRP" and above all numbers on the left side click Play button to get a result

4. In the section "Output" You should get 27-digit number, to make sure it is go to this page -> https://www.lettercount.com/, paste the results and check.

And if You have 27-digit number You are at the 50% of the road for 2.1 BTC but now I'm really don't know what should I do with that number next, so...

Good luck!

That's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure how the "without I/O" hint applies to using a phone keypad?

I'd suggest trying my method above in the first instance, by concatenating your 27 digit number with the 21 digit prime (both before and afterwards) and hashing them with SHA256 to get a private key. I would try it but I'm away from home and on mobile at the moment, and don't really fancy trying to do it manually on my phone. :P

Phemex made another tweet yesterday, saying they will release the final clue to the puzzle on Friday: https://twitter.com/Phemex_official/status/1228318202247237632

As You can see they told already that the priv key is a "big integer" so basically it is not a sha256 hash in my opinion.

To be honest I don't really see any other way that can we convert those words for exactly 27-digit number.

So you think it would be a "big integer" in base10? A private key in base10 would have to be 77 characters long. Any ideas for combining a 21 digit number and a 27 digit number to end up with a 77 digit number?

If you see my post above (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5219581.msg53721679#msg53721679), all the characters of "Phemex", "BTC", "ETH", and "XRP" are present in Base58Check encoding, which is the method used to encode WIF private keys. This encoding also misses out the letters "I" and "O", since they are easily confused with lower case "L" and number zero, which could be the answer to the clue "Without I/O".

No Sir, I am almost 100% sure that there is an one way more as I put in my last post, that can be solved by that way without playing with changing, making, converting some hashes/words into the numbers.

Do You remember that 1BTC puzzle with natasha otomoski? The answer was exactly corelated to the puzzle question so I suggest only it is almost directly translation from the words to the numbers.

if this puzzle is anything like that then you shouldn't waste your time on this one either because a good puzzle is where there is something to solve based on some logical approach like a treasure hunt. you find a clue then it tells you what to do next. otherwise it is like saying the clue is hidden somewhere on planet earth and when you find that the next is also hidden on planet earth!
there simply was no way anyone could come up with something as random and unrelated as "SheHadTheIdeaWhileCombingHerHair" (the solution) by reading the puzzle.
and with that logic the solution to this puzzle could be something like "PhemexIsGoodComeUpAndTradeWithUs"

I am just hoping that this will never turn out to "To register on our exchange platform you have to verify your identity and address". The puzzle was really hard and the CEO and co-founders are pretty confident that this will be decode maybe a year or more, but for now what I can do is really wait for that hint again and then again I'll just can't answer it for sure. Good luck to who/those can decode it, it's a nice reward of bitcoin.

Exactly


--------------------
Phemex_official is *not* Phemex

pooya87, if this account "Phemex_official" would be the official account of Phemex (it is not), I would declare you the winner!


--------------------
Phemex_official is *not* Phemex

This giveaway is not about declaring someone a winner, the winner will be the one who gets access to the bitcoins.

Since no one has solved this puzzle it only proves the complexity of itself... Phemex already gives some hints:


Even with those hints get 27-digit number is a hard task... So, Happy puzzling.

I had a look at this puzzle and guess that it is more marketing/PR thing rather than a real puzzle.
The puzzle should be logical, and resoved withount hints. But not with Phemex.

The easiest part was to find the 21 digit number. At the moment as i understood it is all that was done by the solvers. The hints above told that now solvers should find 27 digit number. It is not clear why? Why solvers need this hint?

Moreover, the current status is that new hint will be released on 21 February: It will be sent via email to all Phemex registered users, to ensure fair competition. Wow, you need to be registered on Phemex exchange to have the next hint. Is it fair?

https://twitter.com/Phemex_official/status/1228318202247237632

Anyway, it is the puzzle by Phemex, their money and they can do anything they like. However this puzzle looks more like a PR/marketing thing rather than real puzzle.

The last hint is:

After meeting the Phemex team, the Goddess Pheme repeated the words “little is big”, twice within three days.  ??? ???

https://phemex.com/references/articles/the-last-hint-of-phemex-2-1btc-puzzle (https://phemex.com/references/articles/the-last-hint-of-phemex-2-1btc-puzzle)

true, but also our judgement of their platform is our right. if this puzzle were an unsolvable shady one that after a lot of advertisement suddenly some anonymous person claims the reward or more precisely moves the coins then we would consider it as fraud ;)

How do you get a 27 digit number?
If I convert it I get 26 digits
https://www.better-converter.com/Encoders-Decoders/Base58Check-to-Hexadecimal-Decoder
And then to decimal


If I use numbers from the Base58Check wiki table, I get 30 digits   :o
Also, shouldn't it be hexadecimal for WIF?

No, you're right. Not every combination of the words results in a 27 digit number. PhemexBTCETHXRP gives 27 characters, while BTCETHXRPPhemex only gives 26. I didn't actually bother to check which combinations were 26 and which were 27, it would have taken longer to do that than it took to just automatically check them all as I did.

No, WIF is Base58Check. The "standard" private key format is hex.

Why are there incoming transactions on the addy all the time o.o
At first I thought the balance showed binary because it was 1.10101 but then I saw there were incoming transactions today.

I wonder why almost all incoming transactions that come on address are 3 numbers repeating?

Not all are
https://www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/974a5c4d597cb648ad4ee526b79d27d5388c0ccd4a6d72d66da2ef3b2dfdcd81
https://www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/47d53dd6d9f251dbd3b847ae2dfcb5e9a3a73e554eeba801ee3afbf921b419e6
https://www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/fea886aef33090775fe8a95c911659a2e7742b95f98b7e4a9620d49c60f559fa

Could it have to do with the hint "little is big (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5219581.msg53884197#msg53884197)"
Many of the transactions come from vanity addresses:
3Phemex
1JEDY
3333333
3666666
3999999
1PHEMEX
1LoveYou
1VERYxx
1MUCHxx
1ThisA1
1VERY1
1NiCE1
1PUZZLE1
(and more)

There's also an OP_RETURN output in many of those transactions. This one (https://www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/2699b8ed86e88d29fff2acd65624cadad763c870f390d32ca5848d51dd137a4b#i=0) for instance:
I have no idea what to make of that.

Can someone tell me how to convert bitcoin HEX private key to WIF? if that is the key i will give a tip

Just ignore this transactions. Some troll keep sending it.

The creators already said on telegram official group that's not part of the puzzle.

For who is interested in joining, heres the link:
https://t.me/Phemex_EN (https://t.me/Phemex_EN)

How this image can help to solve puzzle?

https://i.postimg.cc/3xp7RgF7/LB3.jpg

OK lets look over some of the clue's again..

1. The first 21-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e is: 957496696762772407663
2. The private key you derive from Satoshi’s portrait is a big integer, not Wallet Import Format (WIF)
3. The filename of the picture is irrelevant
4. The next step involves converting some words from the portrait, without I/O, into a 27-digit number
5. Go back to step 4) again if you can’t figure it out

Clue 2


For clue 1,  I have done some searching and found some reference materials in relation to the consecutive digits of e.

If the "2" at the beginning of e is included, the only values for n <= 1000 that change are a(1) = 2, a(3) = 271 and a(85) = 2718281828459045235360287471352662497757247093699959574966967627724076630353547 594571

There are also quite a few other patterns that share the "957496696762772407663" number in the OEIS database :

https://oeis.org/A137443/b137443.txt

Clue 2 says the key would be a Big Int which made me think about it could be something to do with elliptic curves over finite fields that may be something to look into?

https://koclab.cs.ucsb.edu/teaching/ecc/eccPapers/Washington-ch04.pdf


Once I have looked into this some more I will post a further update.

well yes but how he can get private key or we will get more private keys on different format which will give solution to puzzle?

More this puzzle is about endomorphism and maybe can be solved by an advanced mathematician

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


and how this private keys can help us to retrieve private keys from puzzle address?




if someone new another step further let's talk and solve together.

i did the same with 2 alternative additional words: Satoshi and Dorian (it is his picture after all!). used alternative lower case and upper case and both base58 and UTF8 encoding to decode to bytes then to a biginteger in both little and big endian and combined it with the prime as concatenation of the numbers and also with bytes again in both little and big endian. nothing worked :P

hex -> byte -> UTF8 and you'll see (it is advertising keys.lol site)

Just enter the private key in HEX in either https://www.bitaddress.org/ or https://gobittest.appspot.com/PrivateKey, and they will convert it to WIF for you.

Re-reading the clues, I wonder if there is actually two 27 digit numbers. "Little is big" could refer to converting little words (such as "BTC" and "ETH") in to big (27 digit) numbers, and the clue said it was done twice. The previous clues also say to "go back to step 4 again".

Having said that, two 27 digit numbers and a 21 digit is only 75 digits, which isn't quite the 76 or 77 digits in base10 you need to get 64 characters in base16.

What the fuck is this?  :D
--

Maybe we get a small number from the portrait which is actually a big one
https://oeis.org/A137443/b137443.txt

21 957496696762772407663

I was thinking along these lines or maybe we look for a big int in the list that has the desired number included I also checked on the keys.lol with some of the numbers from the clue but no luck.

I then thought about a brain wallet but with the use of the numbers rather than words as an idea.

If your looking on the OEIS database you will find the number "957496696762772407663" seem to replicate in this sequence over and over

https://i.imgur.com/rhJlLSE.png

It may be well off the mark but could it be possible we are looking for one of the larger numbers with the "957496696762772407663" included ?

It's repeated exactly 64 times. The number would be
2134373941424350546368757683859091929310811111411812612812916416616823626627529 2293295298331334335337343345357368369396417427464468485499555579596621649671703 722788812839853963

But it can't be it
We would completely skip the step.

Could it be we need the two numbers one above and the 2nd one to combine them to get the big int

I have a feeling those number will be part of it the repetitions and values are no-coincidence in my view.

Lets say we have to take this large BIG and the Small from the next part and create the key that would point to some logic towards the puzzle.

64 repetitions is indeed an interesting coincidence.

I'm unsure what we could do with so many digits. There's already 178 in that number.
I imagined we could Base58Check, but there's plenty of numbers over 58, so that's not an option.

I think this puzzle has something to do with a brain wallet but not depending on words but rather numbers seem more likely I did notice someone has created a github with some tool for the puzzle

https://github.com/olalonde/phemex-puzzle

I have not tested this yet so if you use it make sure its in a VM or VPS setting as I cannot verify the authenticity of the code yet but from what I see it seems to have a lot of the stuff people are talking about in the topic.

I do believe that the above number or one of the numbers from the table I posted is going to be relevant I don't have much time at the moment to really get stuck into this one but I will keep on posting anything I find along the way.

I think the next step is to look into the possibly of brianwallet's with numbers and maybe words I think my guess about it being elliptic curve's on finite fields may be off course after seeing this post in the git..

https://github.com/olalonde/phemex-puzzle/issues/6

The question is in a very weird format.

'I understand elliptic curve is to be researched and understand by us noobies. But is it required to use to reach the private key?'

So, we're supposed to understand it to get to the key, but not use it?
Though Max hasn't confirmed the first part of his question.

Seems very strange indeed but I would think it would put out a lot of people from the puzzle if it we're calculating the points on the curve with the numbers we have been given. 

I wonder if any of the others will be able to spot anything with the numbers that we may be missing.  However I do have the feeling it's on the right path.

The biggest problem is it's so time exhausting!
I get plenty of ideas but hashing each number, adding 80bytes, rehashing, converting, importing..
It would be so much easier if there was an automatic way to do this.

Ok. so after we found the big integer we need to conver it to private key with this method?

Convert your BigInteger to a byte array of a specific size, then use the first (leftmost) bytes to create a key. For this you need to know the size of the prime p used in DH, as the value needs to be left-padded to represent a key. I would suggest to use standardized DH parameters (or at least make sure that the size of the prime is dividable by 8).



Or is this wrong?

that is the easy part and it doesn't really take any more than a couple of seconds to compute thousands of possible cases. read my previous post, i tested about 1920 variations in about 3 seconds. it is not hashing by the way, it is elliptic curve point multiplication then hashing the public key (i did both compressed and uncompressed).
the hard part is figuring out what the hell this puzzle means and WHAT to try because it is the least clear puzzle i have ever seen and i've seen lots of them.

This. It's not really a puzzle when people are just blindly bruteforcing thousands of potential combinations. The whole point of a puzzle is that there should be logical clues which one can follow to reach the intended outcome. There was zero way to know we are meant to convert the words in to a number before he said so on his blog. There was zero way to know we are looking for a 27 digit number before he said so on his blog. And even with the additional "hints" he has released, there is still no logical path from start to finish. There are people on twitter and GitHub who have bruteforced hundreds of thousands of combinations and methods of turning those 4 words in to numbers, and combining those numbers with the 21 digit prime, and turning the result in to a private key. At this point, it is just a guessing game. Somebody might blindly stumble on the right answer, but it will be through sheer luck, not through any logical reasoning.

It's a bad puzzle, and it's only the size of the prize that is keeping people interested.

You are right brother what Phemex team has announced hits for puzzle it is not given clear points to all of us because there are many communication gaps are there between puzzle and us so I'm also considering this is very bad puzzle to understand. So no one is going to get solution for that until a Phemex  team gives solution for this puzzle.

Phemex has declared that solution to this puzzle will be revealed on 21st of March, 2020. OP has been updated with all the known hints so far, to solve this puzzle.

Good to know that the solution will ultimately be published.

You just understood the whole idea of this event. The main idea of this puzzle is to get the Phemex exchange more popular. When I showed this puzzle to my friend who is a senior developer he said that the puzzle is probably that hard that you have a miracle to solve. I'm not arguing that it isn't solvable but it requires a tons of free time.  Eventually, the puzzle will be solved probably by the person from Phemex and they will split the prize. Seeing how people with extreme knowledge about cryptographic and programming failed I really doubt someone from outside Phemex will solve it.

You can not expect 1.1 BTC to just drop on your lap. Can you?

that's what i also said on day 1.
but also i am starting to think that this kind of popularity may not end up well for them. specially if my suspicious about how this puzzle is going to be solved came true, i think an anonymous person is going to suddenly move the coins and they will claim that someone has solved the puzzle then release the solution pretending it was possible to solve while that anonymous person was the Phemex owner.

As long as they are releasing the solution, does it really matter whether an anonymous person is sweeping the fund or not? Public has got enough time to solve the puzzle and now we need to know whether the puzzle was really solvable or not. No?

This is possible but a move like this will surely bring down their reputation. Phemex releases a lot of hints but to be honest, even though they said its easy already, many still struggling to solve it. I think better that they just use that for giveaway to registering users rather than this crazy impossible puzzle thing to unlock.


Yes of course, they should be transparent when it comes to this kind of contest or else their reputation will easily crumble. Just hoping someone can actually solve this. Cause they might just cancel it and used the hype over the weeks for that puzzle thing for promoting their site for free.

This kind of puzzles is not fit for ordinary people like me, only those who are involved in some kind of programmers or encoders work can solve this kind of puzzle. anyway, the reward is big enough to make every bitcoiners participate in it. however, only a few of them are capable of knowing what is really happening here. 

Would you mind if you will state some good instructions on how we will going to solve the puzzle? All I can see is a face and an eye wuth numbers and it is pretty hard to guess on how we wre going to solve this puzzle and problem. But it seems that the puzzle was s really hard one because until now no one solve it and maybe there are some people who still don't understand this puzzle like me.
Just state some good idea and instructions.

Address is 1h8BNZkhsPiu6EKazP19WkGxDw3jHf9aT

The compressed public key is 02b4a72e4aaa69ba04b80c6891df01f50d191a65eccc61e4e9862d1e421ce815b3.

21 digit prime is 957496696762772407663.

Some words from the image need to be converted into a 27-digit decimal number.

The solution consists in 3 steps:

Finding the 21-digit prime
Converting some words from the image into a 27-digit decimal number.
This step is not known yet but is probably a function of the numbers found in steps 1 and 2 to generate a private key.
The 27-digit number does not start with and probably doesn't contain the 21-digit number (since Max claimed he could only recognize the 2-leading digits easily).

Puzzle is solvable without hints.

Capitalization of words in puzzle matters.

27-digit number is not necessarily a prime.

27-digit number doesn't involve consecutive digits of e.

Max's birthday, username, etc. are not relevant.

Only Max knows the private key but both Jack and Cecilia (chief marketing) know the method.
Letter from MAX:

"The first 21-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e is: 957496696762772407663
Already known
"The private key you derive from Satoshi’s portrait is a big integer, not Wallet Import Format (WIF)"
Seems self-evident since WIF is just a copy/paste friendly encoding of a private key.
"The filename of the picture is irrelevant"
"The next step involves converting some words from the portrait, without I/O, into a 27-digit number"
27-digit decimal number is too small to be the output of a hash function so we can probalby exclude their use for generating the number.
I/O possibly refers to Input/Output which could be a synonym for communication with the outside world (e.g. the puzzle is solvable without additional information found on the web).
I/O possibly refers to the fact that base58 encoding excludes the letters I, O, l, and 0.:

Source: https://github.com/olalonde/phemex-puzzle/blob/master/CLUES.md
 (https://github.com/olalonde/phemex-puzzle/blob/master/CLUES.md)

someone knows the third step ?

Here's the "solution":

https://phemex.com/references/articles/puzzle-ending (https://phemex.com/references/articles/puzzle-ending)

so our initial guess that this is NOT a puzzle but instead a brute force attempt was correct.
and now that the "solution" is released we can be sure that it was impossible to brute force this because the number of cases to check is gigantic and we did not have enough clues specially since we were supposed to use different charsets for the Base-58 decoding and also skip the 3 strings (ETH, BTC, XRP) that were inside that picture and the previous clues suggested they were used!

conclusion: the same as i said day one, this was an advertisement.

Not only that, but the "clues" they released were not only useless, but actively led people in the wrong direction and away from the correct answer.

The first clue was this:
The actual solution was to convert the words "SatoshiNakamoto". Neither the word "Satoshi" nor "Nakamoto" appear anywhere in the portrait, and all the words which do appear in the portrait would obviously give the wrong solution.

If you look at some of the hints that were given on telegram: https://github.com/olalonde/phemex-puzzle/blob/master/CLUES.md#possible-hints-given-on-telegram
We know now this is completely wrong.

Honestly, not only were there not enough clues to reasonable deduce the answer, and not only were there too many possibilities to simply brute force, but the clues and hints which were given out would make it impossible to solve if you followed them, not easier. The whole point of a giveaway like this is to actually give the funds away - they should have released more and more clues until someone claimed the prize, not deliberately obfuscate the answer and then shut the whole thing down without a winner.

Nothing wrong with that, of course they're trying to promote their site. But by not actually continuing by giving real hints until there is a winner, they only make themselves look bad.
Then again, there is no bad publicity (https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/there-is-no-such-thing-as-bad-publicity.html).

See, I was right the Puzzle was impossible to solve/

Im not good or expert in Cryptography and i will probably wouldn't try the challenge for 1.1 BTC only. I've seen people trying to break computer puzzles and some of them really spent all their lives breaking it to no avail like in Cicada puzzle. And what if, the puzzle needs some bruteforcing it would take quite an amount of cpu power in who knows what type of encryption their using and if that doesn't work you have to find new ways to solve it, it's like to trying to find a needle on the vast desert.

They said "The puzzle is solvable without hints" I totally disagree, and now we know that it was just an advertisement for phemex. bad way to start, but yes, there's no bad publicity.

SOLUTION

The first 21-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e is: 957496696762772407663

27-digit number: 237871847045914904726285415 (first hint came out on Jan. 23, two times within three days, also refer to the first two digits:23), b58decode(‘SatoshiNakamoto’), convert the bytes to integer using little endian, which is bigger than that of big endian, charset(default):’123456789ABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijkmnopqrstuvwxyz’

Last number:554405551875, b58decode(‘Phemex’) convert the bytes to integer using little endian,which is also bigger than that of big endian, charset(xrp):’rpshnaf39wBUDNEGHJKLM4PQRST7VWXYZ2bcdeCg65jkm8oFqi1tuvAxyz’

This is the final private key in decimal:126272244427365764086102017718794198001099243823071433146875 =957496696762772407663*237871847045914904726285415*554405551875,

0x141dc7bec50472bb381be8e18f6d6b397773d71fc5d91d41fb in hexadecimal

WIF: KwDiBf89QgGfm2CrqioD77Q1g7urAhFcGUyUCQP3GdGAwCQRszmY

Address: 1h8BNZkhsPiu6EKazP19WkGxDw3jHf9aT

Utter BS. The puzzle was unsolvable IMHO. There is no use of BTC, ETH & XRP! There was no way to know the involvement of Little Endian before the last hint either. I lost so many days behind it.

I agree, they never give a hint about the Little Endian on the puzzle, without that was kind of impossible. There are too many ways to encript a name and get numbers.

I feel disapointed about this giveaway too, feels rigged to me.

not to mention that this picture is the picture of someone called "Dorian Nakamoto". and even if you used these that meant your brute force numbers would have been multiplied by 7 ("Satoshi", "SatoshiNakamoto", "Satoshi Nakamoto", "Dorian", "Dorian Nakamoto", "DorianNakamoto", "Nakamoto").
not having a space between the two words is absurd itself too....

It was necessary to apply brute force to the author’s brain. I went over and the correct option from 0 to 999 exactly as in the solution. But I did not take into account that he used the second version of base58. I came late. I only had 1 week. Another week - and I would have hacked it. Since I understand how the author thinks. He is not very smart ...

WoW! So, you must be a genius. Why dont you apply your intellect here and help us to solve this 100 ETH Puzzle - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5240826.0 ?

Okay, serious question here, How do these folks know what satoshi looked like to be able to create a portrait of him like that? Did anyone stop to ask this question?

this whole thing was a sham to advertise their crappy exchange.
the picture is also a very old news where a magazine found a Japanese American dude with the same birth name and started an article claiming this dude is the creator of bitcoin. suffice it to say that it was nonsense. read more on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto#Dorian_Nakamoto