The code is entirely alphabetical characters, all-caps.


When I said the "6b 7a 8b.." was 'correct', what I meant is that it is an accurate mapping of the 26 unique dot+triangle combinations that can be used for simple substitution, I did not mean the answer is literally "6b7a8b..."


Level 1 was solved and a 1 BTC prize was claimed. It looks like the game is set up with prizes per level.


My goal is to help curious people along without just giving the answer outright. Besides, there's 22 days left before the next gate opens.

Hint #4: The code is nonsense. This is why frequency analysis has failed.

The game has not progressed past the first puzzle. The first step has been solved and there is a timer gating the next step. This recap from a couple months ago is fairly complete/accurate: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1488665.msg15144501#msg15144501

Hint #3: 4pollo's best guesses here are correct*:


* we (micaman, rock_collector, a couple others, and myself) were using different notations for the squares; I am 99% certain that the above is correct but translating between the two is irritating.

Depends on how you implement your brute force - the text game checks the keypad code using an unprotected POST.

Hint #2: The final code was surprisingly long (> 100 characters) with all caps and no spaces.

Level 1 has been SOLVED with the entry of a correct keypad code. Doing so has kicked off a 30 day timer prior to the Level 2 opening. I'll drop a few hints during that time to help folks catch up:

Hint #1: The keypad code is derived entirely from the triangle + dot code. That and the URL for the text adventure are the only pieces of info needed from the painting to complete Level 1.

all,

I've been lurking in the background this time around but have worked through some of the same paths that have already been posted on here. At any rate, I tend to like to facilitate rubber duck debugging on here by producing summaries of what we know when we're stuck, so here goes:

* There are 15 QR codes. They appear to be text adventure room descriptions. Speculation is that they will be clues to other rooms in the text game. Many of them correspond to components of the Porto Alchemica (which I suspect will be important later). There is a reference to Mechanica Mathematica that doesn't seem to lead anywhere.

* One QR is a URL to a text adventure game that wants a keypad entry. Other items in the game don't seem relevant at this point (shirt, shoes, jacket, etc). A small amount of interaction is possible but we are pretty much stuck in a cell with a keypad.

* The QR codes have three different patterns of 4 or 6 gold dots around them. It's not clear what, if anything, this means.

* The tan squares make a non-compliant Aztec code (specifically, it is missing targeting pixels in the upper right of the interior square). Some attempts have been made to use the Aztec decoding algorithm by hand since the upper left portion of the code is all that should matter (the rest is CRC), but it didn't lead to a meaningful outcome. That said, Aztec decoding is voodoo magic so someone else might have better luck.

* Each Aztec pixel has a triangle and an orange dot. There are 26 unique combinations of dots + triangles (9*3 - 1 combo which never used), which seems to imply a basic alphabetical substitution cipher.
** Straightforward mappings combining dots and triangles (e.g., upper left dot + upper left triangle position == A, etc) don't cause anything to jump out for any of several 'normal' orderings of dots and triangles. If this is the mapping I would strongly suggest that the bottom right triangle is T-Z since that triangle is missing a dot in the bottom right position. Performing this mapping results in poor frequency analysis results. My suspicion is that a mapping like this is correct and that we need to understand which letters we need to extract from the grid, and in which order. "The journey inward begins here" may imply reading inwards, and the use of a 2 layer Aztec code might imply in a counterclockwise spiral.
** Other approaches to substitute letters have been promising but have gotten nowhere. Pigpen does not map well. The phone keypad is an interesting approach and results in slightly nicer frequency analysis but you can only do it if you do things like arbitrarily throw out Q and Z, and we haven't had any hints to try to map this to anything having to do with a phone. Also, I find it very hard to ignore the fact that there are 26 combinations of dot + triangle, which keeps me not wanting to jump away from a more straightforward substitution approach.

* Brown/green areas outside the Aztec code area. Unclear if they mean anything or are just art. (There was a LOT of 'just art' in earlier OP games.)

* The image is hosted on an image zoom service. Component image files do not have any EXIF clues. Neither does the map that you can download from the text adventure game.

* In the past there have been two things in the first puzzle step - proof of prize in the form of a public bitcoin address, and a hint leading to the next step. So it's useful to keep in mind that at any point we might encounter both, and that may be leading to confusion now.

iirc they are identical according to bindiff

The Chapel of Saint-Hubert, at Château d'Amboise, France. This is where Leonardo da Vinci's bones are; he created the first conceptual image of a submarine.

Getting more specific - he died in Burg im Leimental (near Basel).

For my next trick I'll guess that it's Basel, Switzerland, where Albert Hoffman, discoverer of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" died.

O, but the UK has already been found, so it must not be Liverpool....

How about Stuttgart, where Heinz Edelman (the artist/designer of Yellow Submarine) died?

Ha, that's fair.

I suppose, riffing off of others and all the other graves mentioned, that I ought to guess Brian Epstein's gravesite, section A grave H12, Long Lane Jewish Cemetery, Aintree, Liverpool.

2: Pepperland

It's still going on!

If so, I look forward to my big payday in buttcoin.

That came up earlier in the thread and someone determined that the game started before Satoshi's email got hacked, so it's probably just happenstance.

General working theory: we are looking for another whit3r4bbi7.com page, and need to use the capital letters in the poem to make a pointer.

here's what we have to work with:

Possible additions:
- O: missing from SATOSHI NAKAMOTO
- GET/GIVE: finish the trailing 'For' word in the poem
- a: there is an extra 'a' in mislead, based on the rhyme scheme
- k: ASCII value of the dangling 107 in the col 15 of DocuColor dots
- v: ascii value of the binary in the puzzle (might just be for v0.3.19)
- DISABLE (from the graphics)

it's generally accepted that 0.3.19 must point at the v0.3.19 of bitcoin, where disabling 'safe mode' is discussed. see more:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2228.0
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Changelog#0.3.19.5B22.5D
http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/26744510/

Some possible words to add from 0.3.19:
DOS
SAFE MODE

Other random note: the timestamp in the DocuColor output is off by 8 hours from the time that the first Bitcoin block was mined. That might be some kind of hint to shift something by 8.

If anything, we have too much to work with rather than too little. A lot of us have been paying special attention to the short set of "extra" letters, looking for anagrams and applying ROT, but nobody's come up with anything yet as far as I'm aware.

What was the tweet? I didn't see it.

Incidentally, I am working on a document similar to what shorena did last time around. It's already to 11 pages, and I haven't even put in any of the jpegs/pngs yet.