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1  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Technical Support / Re: SATAOSHI ASCII FDF%F%F% on: March 03, 2024, 01:09:58 PM
l have to delve deeper into the Bitcoin protocol documentation and the X.690 standard to understand the intricacies of Bitcoin's encoding schemes further. I did know about DER encoding but even with this I haven't yet been able to understand the use of F% yet.

thx

Bitcoin Protocol Documentation:

In the context of the Bitcoin protocol, the hexadecimal notation is extensively used for representing binary data, particularly for transaction ids, block hashes, and script values. The symbol "%", however, does not have a standard or documented use within the Bitcoin protocol's official documentation. The protocol primarily focuses on binary data representation, cryptographic operations, and network message formats, where data is typically encoded in hexadecimal for readability and compactness. There's no inherent function or recognized encoding pattern that directly involves the "%" symbol as part of the core protocol documentation.
X.690 Standard (ASN.1 and DER Encoding):

The X.690 standard, which details the rules for DER (Distinguished Encoding Rules) as part of ASN.1 (Abstract Syntax Notation One), is concerned with the encoding of data structures for secure and efficient transmission. This standard specifies a binary format for encoding data structures that include various data types. While it uses a comprehensive approach to data representation, including the specification of types, lengths, and values (TLV), the "%" symbol does not play a role in the syntax or encoding schemes described by the X.690 standard. The standard focuses on binary and hexadecimal representations for encoding and does not utilize the "%" symbol as part of its specified encoding formats.
The "%" symbol is commonly used in programming and data formats for purposes such as URL encoding (percent-encoding) or as a placeholder in string formatting operations across various programming languages. However, it is not a standard symbol within the hexadecimal notation system nor is it a recognized part of the encoding schemes in the Bitcoin protocol or the DER encoding rules specified by the X.690 standard.


so basically "%" is not used in Bitcoin, but I know it once was, so the question remains open.
2  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Technical Support / Re: Satoshi Compact Varint - CVARINT on: March 03, 2024, 12:58:06 PM
Thx for replying, sorry I missed your reply as I have been away.

I have mastered VARINT now and get it , but there was in the past more to this, especially a printed ASCII variant translation of Blockchain data.

I am now drilling down to understanding FDF%F%F% etc found in Satoshi ascii text scripts of blockchain data from 2007-2010.

Once I can resolve "F%" then I may be closer to understanding my project.

Thx again
3  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Technical Support / SATAOSHI ASCII FDF%F%F% on: March 03, 2024, 12:44:12 PM
I'm delving into the historical aspects of Bitcoin's development, particularly the encoding methods used in the early .dat files created by Satoshi Nakamoto. My focus is on understanding the specific patterns and encoding schemes employed in these foundational stages, specifically the use of uppercase hex letters for blockchain data representation and two distinct patterns: "FD FE FF" and "F%F%F%".

"FD FE FF" Encoding: I understand that these sequences are related to varint encoding, with each prefix indicating the byte length of the subsequent integer ("FD" for 2-byte, "FE" for 4-byte, and "FF" for 8-byte integers). This compact representation method is fascinating, and I'm eager to learn more about its application and technical details within the Bitcoin blockchain data structure.

"F%F%F%" Pattern: This pattern is less clear to me. It does not seem to align with standard hexadecimal notation or Bitcoin's varint encoding principles. Could someone shed light on the use and translation of "F%" in the early Bitcoin code or data formatting? Is this a custom encoding method, or does it have a specific application that is not widely documented?

I'm looking for documents, discussions, or any form of literature that might explain the rationale, usage, and technical specifics of these patterns, especially the elusive "F%F%F%". Insights into Satoshi's encoding choices or references to discussions in early forums or code comments would be incredibly helpful.

Thank you for your time and expertise. I'm looking forward to deepening my understanding of Bitcoin's technical history with your help.
4  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Technical Support / Re: Satoshi Compact Varint - CVARINT on: January 31, 2024, 04:19:54 PM
some merit there, did that already but I have DM 'ed the string to test,  see if you can work it out?
5  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Technical Support / Satoshi Compact Varint - CVARINT on: January 31, 2024, 10:34:27 AM
Hello, my transformation needs to be precisely reversible. The Satoshi compact CVarint (not Varint) was used.
Here is my Python interpretation, but it seems to have created characters outside the ascii range so I can't verify.

serialize.h of the period doesn't address this fully, appreciate any pointers, artifacts ??

def encode_camount(amount):
    # CAmount transformation
    if amount == 0:
        transformed_value = 0
    else:
        e = 0
        while amount % 10 == 0 and e < 9:
            amount //= 10
            e += 1
        if e < 9:
            d = amount % 10
            n = amount // 10
            transformed_value = 1 + 10 * (9 * n + d - 1) + e
        else:
            transformed_value = 1 + 10 * (amount - 1) + 9

    # MSB base-128 encoding
    encoded_bytes = []
    while transformed_value > 0:
        byte = transformed_value & 0x7F
        transformed_value >>= 7
        if transformed_value > 0:
            byte |= 0x80
            byte -= 1
        encoded_bytes.insert(0, byte)

    return encoded_bytes

def decode_camount(encoded_bytes):
    # Decode the variable-length integer
    decoded_value = 0
    for i, byte in enumerate(reversed(encoded_bytes)):
        if i > 0:
            decoded_value += (byte + 1) * (128 ** i)
        else:
            decoded_value += byte

    # Reverse the CAmount transformation
    if decoded_value == 0:
        return 0
    e = decoded_value % 10
    decoded_value = (decoded_value - 1) // 10
    if e < 9:
        n = decoded_value // 9
        d = decoded_value % 9 + 1
        original_amount = n * 10 + d
    else:
        original_amount = decoded_value + 1
    original_amount *= 10 ** e

    return original_amount


input_string = "<provided if you can help>"



# Step 1: Encoding - Convert each character to a byte and encode
encoded_data = [encode_camount(ord(c)) for c in input_string]
print("Encoded Data:", encoded_data)

# Step 2: Decoding - Decode each byte sequence
decoded_bytes = [decode_camount(data) for data in encoded_data]
print("Decoded Bytes:", decoded_bytes)

# Step 3: Re-encoding - Re-encode the decoded bytes
reencoded_data = [encode_camount(b) for b in decoded_bytes]
print("Reencoded Data:", reencoded_data)

# Step 4: Convert reencoded data back to byte literals
reencoded_bytes = bytearray()
for data in reencoded_data:
    for byte in data:
        reencoded_bytes.append(byte)

# Convert bytearray to string for display
reencoded_string = ''.join(format(x, '02x') for x in reencoded_bytes)
print("Reencoded Byte String:", reencoded_string)

# Step 5: Verification
verification = ''.join(format(ord(c), '02x') for c in input_string) == reencoded_string
print("Verification Successful:", verification)

Thx for any pointers outside a google search....
6  Bitcoin / Mining support / Does any have Steven Chan's contact details, Miner working in Oracle until 2020? on: December 03, 2021, 01:28:36 PM
I would really like to share a message with Steven Chan cryptographer from Oracle, who was mining in 2010.

Please make contact..

Thx
7  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Technical Support / Re: Legend with wallet skills required! on: June 05, 2021, 06:01:57 PM
I have a few questions:

Where is there a timestamp in a 2010 wallet? position in relation to ... KEY! 036b657921 or 0201010420

I assume the privkey is after 0201010420 ?

Why does a wallet have so many bloody privkeys?

Does the wallet hold coin info like how many, if so what is location ref above.

I have been studying it in hex viewer and isolating/ colouring the repeatable hex values, can see keymeta! information and key! and privkey magic no problem, why wouldn't format be recognised? key things to look for?
8  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Technical Support / Re: Legend with wallet skills required! on: June 05, 2021, 05:46:27 PM
Hey!

My story moved on a bit, now its about a wallet which for both Bitcoin-wallet.exe and pywallet I am getting issues. Neither loads correctly, btc-wallet says unrecognised file format. Not encrypted, but 2500 keys. Tried manually, but not 100% sure the process is correct.

Bitcoin Bounty Hunter already here but can't disclose as may or may not be genuine, can't/ won't verify fully.

Need to find a way to resolve with someone trusted, if already gone would like to discover when/ where.

9  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Technical Support / Legend with wallet skills required! on: June 05, 2021, 04:05:15 PM
I am struggling to recover coins from an old wallet and need a pro who eats 2010 Berkeley db's in his sleep, it might just be a lesson on how to identify empty wallets but hopefully will be a few beers.. ideally be nice to understand and fix the wallets issue and open the original file as I am told everything it backwardly compatible?. (not a believer soz!)

There is an obvious need to be trusted and open to share knowledge, I don't just want to dump keys and move on, I would like to understand the deeper history, assuming there is or perhaps was one.

Always happy to share rewards of a successful result but this isn't making anyone rich.

Message me if interested.






10  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Technical Support / Re: 2010 Wallet delivery and encryption "Treasure Hunt" on: February 26, 2021, 11:33:50 PM
Tried the brain wallet, no outputs. don't believe that's the end of my story.

I realise the complexity of the process, I was really hoping that an old miner would put up his hand and admit to doing this in 2010.

Whilst playing his game, it inadvertently gave me 80+ similar but unique files... I am sure we will get there in the end, couple of coders taking a look, thanks to the forum, who knows really.

Appreciate your interest. thx
11  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Technical Support / Re: 2010 Wallet delivery and encryption "Treasure Hunt" on: February 26, 2021, 02:33:58 PM
...and this, ladies and gentlemen, is why "security through obscurity" and attempting to do "clever things"™ when trying to secure your private keys is simply a "bad idea"™ Undecided

As unfortunate as it is for OP, I hope that this might help persuade people who think that doing things like re-arranging 12/24 word seeds, or substituting words or using some other "clever" process to try an obfuscate their private keys/seeds etc is just not a great plan.

It should hopefully also act as a cautionary tale about leaving coins in wallets that you did not create yourself and/or have not "tested" the backup/recovery process.


At the end of it I had data. one of which said DO_NOT_DELETE_72aXXXX a 32 bit hex key another an image of a playing card which I think was the image to remember from the game.
when you say "32 bit hex key"... do you mean 32 characters?


.... totally in agreement.... for what its worth, KISS! (keep it simple stupid), sorry yes 32 character hex!
12  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Technical Support / Re: 2010 Wallet delivery and encryption "Treasure Hunt" on: February 26, 2021, 10:33:27 AM

Turns out that this is 98% of my challenge thanks but now to figure out which policy needs to be applied. In other words very close but no cigar!.
13  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Technical Support / Re: 2010 Wallet delivery and encryption "Treasure Hunt" on: February 26, 2021, 10:24:35 AM
Are you saying that private keys are purposely hidden somewhere in the data, and them you paid for them knowing that you might not be able to find them or that they might not exist at all?

That makes little sense to me.

...sure and I would agree with you now, however, back in 2010 I was trading stocks, bitcoin was little more than an idealistic story. I spoke with a guy in the UK who sounded extremely knowledgeable, a cryptographer, a Bitcoin Miner, the right person!. He said he was a software developer who mined coins and was creating a new bitcoin exchange business. I asked if he could sell me some bitcoin to introduce me to the technology and processes, he gave me a url and I followed his instructions. At the end of it I had data. one of which said DO_NOT_DELETE_72aXXXX a 32 bit hex key another an image of a playing card which I think was the image to remember from the game.

I was busy and forgot about it all for a year, came back to it in 2011 with more time and a greater understanding of privkeys but couldn't derive my privkey or a wallet from these files.

NO BIG DEAL IN 2010-11. But 2021 and it is many 1000's of btc,  so sense would dictate to look at it again .

I had a bad first experience as did many.. I paid money and took a risk, everyone holding bitcoin takes the same journey! keys or not, sense or not its now a fun challenge to solve .

I need cryptographers not agony aunts!
14  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Technical Support / Re: 2010 Wallet delivery and encryption "Treasure Hunt" on: February 25, 2021, 06:12:42 PM
back in the days, i remember playing around with those swf's... IIRC, there used to be tools to decompile them and look at the sourcecode? Maybe you can find a hint therein?

We took the .swf apart and nothing to say about it. But would be very interested in any standard tools which may have been around in 2010?? tools to translate an imagefile and a 32bit hex word into a privkey Wink
15  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Technical Support / Re: 2010 Wallet delivery and encryption "Treasure Hunt" on: February 25, 2021, 06:06:15 PM
Anyone got any experience of this? can you offer any clues? do you recognise this or sell me these files?? I would now like to open the wallet lol!
https://www.dropbox.com/s/4pgfaa9gmnk2kn2/Screenshot%202021-02-22%2010.45.50.png?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/vickqz8f2kvtlj9/Screenshot%202021-02-22%2010.57.00.png?dl=0

Shockwave is an animation system that can be used to make simple interactive 2D games. A SWF contains the program. There is nothing in either of those two folders that look like they might even be remotely related to bitcoin.

A bitcoin wallet is usually stored in a file called wallet.dat in a folder that typically contains the following files and folders:

anchors.dat
banlist.dat
bitcoin.conf
blocks
chainstate
db.log
debug.log
fee_estimates.dat
mempool.dat
peers.dat
settings.json
wallet.dat

It looks like your folder has those along with other unrelated stuff.



... this flash file was the interface to obtain the "files" from which I understood that I should have been able to obtain private keys. Researching this more I am certain that image24.png is used as  a hex checksum or is hashed SOMEHOW with a 32 bit key to derive the  privkey. I have been testing and get results! (opening two other users wallets!!) but not the private keys I am after. I just don't know exactly what standard was applied to the process here, Hash the image, passphrase as a salt, hash the passphrase, single hash, double hash whos to know...? thx for the comments, its a privkey I am after here... certain of it.
16  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Technical Support / Re: 2010 Wallet delivery and encryption "Treasure Hunt" on: February 23, 2021, 11:46:22 PM
It's first time i hear people actually obfuscate or/and encrypted wallet inside video game. Assuming it's not fake/hoax, i suspect it uses non-standard obsfucation, encryption or private key representation.

 ...Totally agree but this was May 2010 when lots of experimentation was taking place ...

I know there are few standard for wallet on early days of Bitcoin, but IMO hiding it on video game is still unusual.

But I think the bigger question here is what kind of wallet it is? All wallet softwares put a special sequence of bytes at the beginning of the wallet file that uniquely identifies its type (the so-called Magic Bytes).

Install a hex editor such as HxD (and make a copy of the extracted wallet file because HxD allows you to unintentionally edit and save the file just by typing keys on the keyboard!) and open the wallet file with it, look at the first 10 or so bytes and see if they match any of the defined magic bytes.

Shouldn't OP look for magic bytes used by bitcoin (such as 62 31 05 00 09 00 00 00) ?

Source : https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/41447/filesystem-is-corrupt-how-to-find-wallet-dat

...Appreciate that, will certainly take a deeper dive for the magic bytes, but feel we are looking for hidden private keys..
17  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Technical Support / Re: 2010 Wallet delivery and encryption "Treasure Hunt" on: February 23, 2021, 11:40:06 PM

Thx ... we are on it like white on rice!
18  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Technical Support / Re: 2010 Wallet delivery and encryption "Treasure Hunt" on: February 22, 2021, 12:56:27 PM
If you do not have sole control of the private keys, then it is reasonable to assume that you were never in control of any Bitcoins at any point in time.

I don't see the point of the "miner" selling you the wallet without giving you any directions to retrieve it. What did you mean by Blockchain says otherwise? Did he give you an address or something?

... a valid point, but I have reason to believe this wasn't the intention of the seller/ miner and evidence on the blockchain points me to a software issue in 2011 which caused the loss of access for the developer to a significant haul of unsold btc which our transaction leads directly back to..  I feel that I do have the keys , just can't identify them!
19  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Technical Support / Re: 2010 Wallet delivery and encryption "Treasure Hunt" on: February 22, 2021, 12:49:11 PM
It's first time i hear people actually obfuscate or/and encrypted wallet inside video game. Assuming it's not fake/hoax, i suspect it uses non-standard obsfucation, encryption or private key representation.

 ...Totally agree but this was May 2010 when lots of experimentation was taking place ...
20  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Technical Support / 2010 Wallet delivery and encryption "Treasure Hunt" on: February 22, 2021, 11:23:43 AM
Anyone got experience with wallets supplied to the customer contained in swf game files?

I purchased btc from a miner in May 2010, he provided an online game login to retrieve the wallet/s.

Instead of getting a simple privkey I ended up with a folder of game files which appear to be encrypted. These have sat in a folder on my PC for 11 years, I thought it might have been a hoax except the blockchain suggests otherwise. The swf file runs a simple image which does nothing, perhaps it used to contact a server but now nought.

The miner was a UK developer, I have lost all contact details.

One folder has a 32bit key title, The images seem to linked to a gozp.dat file but this won't open in either QT nor Electrum when renamed to wallet.dat. A weird .png image exists which seems to have a long hash key inside it... it's confusing.

Anyone got any experience of this? can you offer any clues? do you recognise this or sell me these files?? I would now like to open the wallet lol!





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