the 63 tiles could represent the 64-character hex encoding of a private key, if the first character was 0. the flames could indicate which hex character each tile is supposed to represent and the meanders could represent the order the hex characters are supposed to be read off the board.

way too easy to cheat then. programs exist which can test many millions of hashes per second. there's also precomputed hashes available as rainbow tables.

They're also known as greek keys (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meander_%28art%29), and since the keys on the left and right corners are pointing in different directions, that might be significant.

If you want to make the game a bit more challenging, you could convert the image to a puzzle like how bitsolve did it. I think he used this tool to create the puzzle: http://flash-gear.com/puzzle/ . That should prevent the use of image search, since you'd first need to completely solve the puzzle, then take a screenshot to feed it to google images.

these contests are either way too hard or way too easy. this one takes literally a few seconds to get the answer using google image search.

Maybe related? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phoenix_and_the_Turtle
oh, somebody also mentioned that in the twitter thread.

More wordplay than puzzle, since the repeated word wasn't even in that list of 30 words.

I'm pretty sure the cartoon is of Graco Ramírez. But that doesn't help find the artist if the image is scanned from a magazine that isn't online.

Nothing is infallible: https://github.com/neuroradiology/InsideReCaptcha

Related: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=749911.msg10432206#msg10432206

FYI, the definition of dust used to be 5460 satoshi, but was reduced to 546 satoshi when the minimum transaction fee was reduced to 1000 satoshi. Even if you have a wallet full of bitmils (0.001), spending them all at once can incur a large transaction fee.

I think a guide would be helpful to faucet users on how to join their small inputs together so they can eventually be used without large fees. When I was searching for that info, I found mostly misinformation and little understanding of how the inputs affect the transaction priority. I now have a script that every day slowly cleans up my wallet by batching up small inputs with a larger input and creating a free transaction that gets confirmed quickly.

did anybody even win the first round? the scores cleared and the homepage says "No rounds played yet."

Wouldn't it make more sense to sort the list by top score so far, so we can compare our score against it? Otherwise the list isn't very helpful. Better yet, would be to just show the current top score on the same page as our score, so we can see right away if we lost the current round or still have a change, e.g. "your lucky number: 100, the current top number is 55,000".

looks like the OP actually logs in frequently and posts in other threads, so it's clear the site is intentionally aborted.

nope, it will incur the exact same transaction fee no matter where you send it. it might be easy to get rid of the dust, but it's plain stupid to waste it if you have multiple BTC in dust.

I guess I should have expected this type of response given that this thread is in the Beginners forum. Read up on transaction fees.  You will see that when certain conditions are met, no transaction fee is required. Using ANY method other than the one described by DannyHamilton will result in very large fees if your transaction includes many small inputs. That is why it is best to avoid dust, but if you already have a lot of it and don't want to just throw it away, you can rescue them by slowly building the small inputs into larger inputs. Then you can use your entire BTC balance to buy stuff instead of needing a significant percentage of it to pay the fees to transmit your transactions.

I have enough dust that the fees would actually be higher than the total value of the dust. There are methods to remove dust by sending them as miner's fees (https://github.com/petertodd/dust-b-gone), but I want to rescue the dust and consolidate it into usable inputs. DannyHamilton's method would allow for this and require 0 fees.

I see in this older thread you were considering writing a program to do this. Are you still game, or has somebody else written one by now?

If we hold onto the ticket and wait for the site balance to be refilled, will the ticket expire? I'd rather get a large payment when I hit my microwallet threshold, than have a tiny 6K direct payment.

It seems to be common for fun free games to fizzle out. Same thing happened to BitSolve, CryptoContests, brainwallet challenge, and many more. Bitcoin Scramble is still running for now, but the owner barely communicates and the games are either too easy or too hard. I think the common cause of failure among these free games is that they're run by a single person who loses motivation for whatever reason (no ROI, users bitching, etc.). We need a devoted forum or subreddit so others can step in and take over maintenance or innovate. They could even be funded by changetips, which is all the rage now.