Ok, here's a 1BTC puzzle.

[BitThinker42]

I googled this words:

Code:

bitcoin filetype:txt

and found some books and articles about bitcoin. In tow of them mentioned that the reason of why total number of bitcoins is 21 million(finit) is because Satoshi wants Bitcoin mimic supply of gold in blockchain system.

[iq_armando]

Why 21 Million?

Technical Explanation
One of the reasons was the need to keep the number of Satoshis within the limits of 64-bit double floating numbers with a small margin for multiplication/division rounding.

64 bit floating gives 52 bits of explicit storage. Interestingly 2 to the power of 51 is 2,251,799,813,685,248 units. This is just enough to store 21 million coins times 10⁸ divisions.

Mathematical Explanation
Calculate the number of blocks per 4-year cycle:

6 blocks per hour

6 blocks per hour
* 24 hours per day
* 365 days per year
* 4 yeears per cycle
= 210,240

~= 210,000

Sum all the block reward sizes:

50 + 25 + 12.5 + 6.25 + 3.125 + .... = 100

Multiply the two:

210,00 * 100 = 21 millions

Economically, because the currency is effectively infinitely divisible, then the precise amount doesn’t matter, as long as the limit remains fixed.

Since Bitcoin is often compared to gold, total coins matches total amount of gold mined in human history which can be imagined as a cube 21 m on a side.

As it is not entirely so important how many Bitcoins will exactly be mined. Satoshi could have easily chosen almost any number. He could just adjust block reward halving (210 000 blocks), reward sizes (50, 25, 12.5 …) etc. to match some particular number.

https://cryptalker.com/21-million/

[BrewMaster]

Why 21 Million?
Technical Explanation
One of the reasons was the need to keep the number of Satoshis within the limits of 64-bit double floating numbers with a small margin for multiplication/division rounding.

considering 21 million is amount and is only used in that context you do not do any multiplication or division on it. only addition and subtraction and since it falls within the max there is no overflow.
secondly we have nothing called "64-bit double floating number", there is double precision floating point and that has nothing to do with what bitcoin uses since there is no decimal precision here. we have purely a 64 bit integer. or int64_t  in c++ which is
9,223,372,036,854,775,807 and bitcoin has
       2,100,000,000,000,000

64 bit floating gives 52 bits of explicit storage. Interestingly 2 to the power of 51 is 2,251,799,813,685,248 units. This is just enough to store 21 million coins times 10⁸ divisions.

i honestly am confused where they are getting these numbers from!
64 bit would give you 64 bits not 52 bits! not to mention that the maximum value of a 64 bit floating point is 1.7e308!

[bitcoin_collector]

Here is a message from the OP blockladder, which have been deleted since but still appears in a quote:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1306844.msg13387075#msg13387075

Does not mean the puzzle is not legit but blockladder doesn't seem to have a lot of faith in Bitcoin, maybe why he is giving it away lol.

Also googling for "blockladder bitcointalk" I found a page with title "Block Ladder: shroom supply" and it does really weirds stuffs (popups and alerts everywhere) when you click the first button (do at your own risk, or just don't).

[bitart]

I've just done a quick google search for Natasha Otomoski and found 1 result, but I don't understand the language and the facebook page doesn't load for me, probably because I don't use facebook account, so I can't reach the content?

Code:

1 result (0.30 seconds) 
Search Results
Web results
Blockchain - Thanks to our awesome ambassadors attending ...
https://hi-in.facebook.com/blockchain/posts/thanks-to-our.../1180872818611963/
40 पसंद13 टिप्पणियाँ9 साझाकरणपसंद करें · टिप्पणी करें · साझा करें. सबसे प्रासंगिक. Natasha Otomoski, Jorge Maurício Ulrichsen, ...

Change the URL from
https://hi-in.facebook.com/blockchain/posts/thanks-to-our.../1180872818611963/
to:
https://facebook.com/blockchain/posts/thanks-to-our.../1180872818611963/

With this simple method, you will display this article in your local system language (keeping the fonts readable to you)

By the way, you can not waste time, because I've already checked it a few days ago and I did not find anything in this post ... Maybe it's some clue ...?

OK, so no new information, in the end.
Anyway, thanks for this trick, I didn't know it previously, it seems useful

[breakingbit]

Few thoughts:

- The Italian alphabet has 21 official letters
- A toothcomb is a dental structure found in some mammals
- The question mark reminded me of mini private keys (Casascius physical bitcoin), where you need to add a question mark to the entire private key (string) to check if it's "well formed" (two leading zeroes in the resulting sha256 hash)

e.g.

foo@bar:~$ echo -n "S6c56bnXQiBjk9mqSYE7ykVQ7NzrRy" |sha256sum
4c7a9640c72dc2099f23715d0c8a0d8a35f8906e3cab61dd3f78b67bf887c9ab  -
foo@bar:~$ echo -n "S6c56bnXQiBjk9mqSYE7ykVQ7NzrRy?" |sha256sum
000f2453798ad4f951eecced2242eaef3e1cbc8a7c813c203ac7ffe57060355d  -

[ryap12]

Why do I have this strong feeling that blockladder is an alt of someone here? The owner never log back in to the blockladder account since January 12, 2019 and as mentioned here that the other 3 posts he/she made was made 3 years ago. So It must be an alt account and the guy behind is just lurking somewhere. Maybe if we get to figure his alt, he might give us another hint for this.

Here are the posting dates of blockladder: (oldest to newest)
December 10, 2015, 10:44:52 AM
December 10, 2015, 11:21:18 AM
December 10, 2015, 06:07:06 PM
December 28, 2015, 03:47:08 PM (deleted post)
January 12, 2019, 10:33:13 AM

If you look at it. He/She intentionally used this account to post about the puzzle and then just vanish.

[runlola]

If you look at it. He/She intentionally used this account to post about the puzzle and then just vanish.

That's standard operating procedure for puzzle creators. ytcoinartist used to disappear whenever she released a new puzzle. If they didn't, people would spend all their energy hounding them for clues, instead of actually trying to solve the puzzle.

[ryap12]

That's true though. Even if I put myself into it, I would do the same so people stop bugging me off. You're right. I guess we just really have to solve it ourselves and by luck may be given a new clue.

[bulleteyedk]

As others mentioned earlier in the thread we might be looking at a brainwallet, and looking into that i found this github repo, that should be able to crack this.

Im not that much of a Linux guy, but i've made a Virtualbox of an Ubuntu, trying to get this running... but no luck until now, i get a compile error..
I hope others will look into this with more succes than me

https://github.com/ryancdotorg/brainflayer

I've collected some of the most common english words, and used them to make 32 char wordlist, based on the format W T C O N O H T as i still think these capital letters should be used in that exact way, until now i've tried some of the words on that JSFiddle source, watashi-kokoto provided... no luck

If there just was a way to load a txtfile (32 chars words) into that JSFiddle it would make things a little bit easier, but unfortunally my programming skills are lacking, been too long since i last coded anything.


Since i did not manage to get that brainflayer up and running i started looking at hashcat -> https://hashcat.net/hashcat/ that program really have some intensive features, im not sure i can be used to check these hex values of the hash160 value? anynone having experience using hashcat?

[bulleteyedk]

You might be right on that...

As i have not succeded in compiling the github repo, i really can't tell.
It was my hope that i could check the passphrases that i already gatherered up against that wallet address we know

There is not much information about this tool laying around.

[bulleteyedk]

On another note, the wordlist that i have generated was done with "Mentalist", a pretty cool tool, with lots of options.

You can find this here -> https://github.com/sc0tfree/mentalist

I have used it to combine 8 wordlists to one total, which looks like this in the tool:

[stevewig]

That's not the way brainflayer works.

You supply it with a list of public addresses (hash160), and a word list.
Then it will use all the words in that list to see if it can find the private key for the supplied address(es)

I have a working copy on a Linux box. It only uses the list though, not a combination of words from the list.

[bulleteyedk]

There really is not much information about that brainflayer utility, so thank you for giving me that information...

I have compiled a wordlist in the right format (8 words camelcase, 32 chars) so basicly i just need to convert that to hash160 and run it up against that public wallet address we have?

[nutildah]

Really I'm astounded at the amount of work people are putting in to "crack" the riddle rather than just trying to solve it. All the more power to you...

[stevewig]

Kind of. You'd generate your wordlist (list of possible combinations) then run BrainFlayer with that list. If it finds a match, it will tell you.

P.S. this isn't something I have done, but that's how brainflayer works.

The difficult part is generating the list, but it would look something like this.

WeTrustCodeOnNetworkOfHashTheory
WeTrustCodeOfNakamotoOnHashTrust
WeTrustCodeOfNakamotoOfHashTrust
WeTrustCodeOfNakamotoOrHashesToo
WeTrustChainsOfNetworkOnHashTime
WeTrustChainOfNetworkOnHashTrust
WeTrustCashOnNetworkOrHavingThem
WeTrustCashOnNetworkOnlyHaveThem
WeTrustChainOnNetworkOverHashToo

the hash 160 of the prize address is = 0129e842a3d00363fa818d3fde2b2f0879159801

[bulleteyedk]

great... now i just need to get that brainflayer utility compiled - will def. give it another try...

thanks for the extra information regarding the use of that utility  

EDIT: what linux distro have you succesfull used to run brainflayer?

[stevewig]

I use Ubuntu. Can’t see any reason why it would’nt work on others though.

I just need a word list now.

I can generate one, but creating one that ignores anything greater than 32 characters is the complicated part

[bulleteyedk]

I made my 8 CamelCase wordlists using Mentalist as i did mention earlier in this thread, i must admit - i have only created a small number of words in total, as this had to be done in steps, as i was only able to make 7 words with mentalist, otherwise the wordlist would get to approx 160GB in size.

Then when i had the 7 wordlist i split that up into smaller pieces like 800k lines in each, and then made an import into excel which i then used to calculate number of chars, i've then used Mentalist once again with the 7 wordslist that matched the correct remaing number of chars for the last character.

My plan was to try and get Brainflayer up and running with these, but until now, that have been steady uphill as i have been battling compiling that code without errors.

Im using a virtualbox running Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS, and i've been getting a -pthread error i managed to narrow down to editing the makefile, but still it seems that Brainflayer can't run.

Could you help me out with the command line for running the utility?
 

[bulleteyedk]

the wordlist containing 7 words is approx 4.5GB, i've then split that into some smaller .txt files with 800k lines in each... added the last word to fill up to 32 chars, but for now only for 6.4mill words

EDIT: actually i've only used the most common english words, from this site -> https://www.englishclub.com/vocabulary/common-words.htm
Then i've stick to the format (W,T,C,O,N,O,H,T) which i still believe have some meaning and only used those words with those letters