No idea what's going on?Check out the previous puzzles:
Hint 1:
The first 5 letters of the second address are missing two vowels. | Addendum: The words in the addresses direct you to certain parts of the forum.
Hint 2:
Where BBCode cannot exist, something else does. Word processors may help. | Addendum: Check for hidden characters.
Hint 3:
Perhaps you should look for the reference but in a different format.
SOLUTIONStep 1: The first post has the contents: [color=#ba58ec][url=https://27ebfGNx4nJQT2dfs3E4mxV3tuytamWeJm86K77pa3SDrzk]. ba58en → Base 58 Encoding on the 273bf... string.
Step 2: Decoding the 27ebf... string leads to the 1NEGtaGs... address which sent the prize to 1shBNg... and on my trust page, I was given a neg tag that included a shebang in it.
Step 3: The text was: "part of the corrupt gang#! with tman lauda
M Darkstar hhampuz all
5 collude" with a reference of
search. This was by user "dtmorelikeshitty"
Step 4: MD5 hash of "search" is 06a943c59f33a34bb5924aaf72cd2995 and searching for it on-forum leads to this post: (irrelevant parts deleted)
06a943c59f33a34bb5924aaf72cd2995Example (with only 4 people):
i agree because the bitcoin will rise and fall because volatility
Step 5: I sent a positive trust to Cyrus: "4 real, a great quality admin with Zeal. I'd trust them as a proper AdjudicAtor. 6" and the characters 4gqZjcA6 were surrounded by 0-width whitespace characters.
Step 6: The reference was to pastebin, which leads to
https://pastebin.com/4gqZjcA6:
One half is found on my profile.
The other half can be found with another search.
There will be a suffix to add... found on the other profile.
Where my profile contains the partial private key 5KVwLpFLnaf2RrDnK9gZRky
Step 7: Searching again for the SHA-256 hash of "search" returns this post:
Re: What exactly is Trust Depth?Step 8: The
dtmorelikeshitty profile has the user "QBFD4raRqXMjwBRWqFR1GqyCN" in its trust list.
Step 9: The dtmorelike profile also has "... + DQw" in its profile.
Step 10: Putting all three parts together (5KVwLpFLnaf2RrDnK9gZRkyQBFD4raRqXMjwBRWqFR1GqyCNDQw) leads to the private key.
Done.
