offering up a "where we stand currently", to collect our collective thoughts. I've been poking at this in the background on and off for the last couple days and have mostly kept quiet since I haven't gotten anywhere. this is a collection of thoughts from everyone on here, and I haven't given proper attribution in a few cases.
color of cells and letters are tricky to discern so are probably not part of puzzle
plaintext public bitcoin address is in the puzzle: 1HXUobwcB19cGDrghuh42HDdJdJvrJUEra
- a couple coded messages with BTC values using simple ascii->binary encodings (SOCLOSE, ZZZ)
- a countdown from 23, skipping 3, 5, and 8.
- some other binary-like transactions that don't translate easily (possibly due to mining fees)
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- I am convinced that the blue dot is a major key or hint, and figuring out how to interpret it is vital to the next step.
- S4VV4s has been systematically exhaustively checking for private bitcoin addresses using brute force on interpretations of the dots and the character string, without success.
- shorena attempted to convert the dots into bit shifts to see what the math would yield, and that didn't get anywhere.
- shorena attempted to Caesar shift the characters and didn't find anything.
- shorena produced a bunch of shifted versions of the ascii string to check for keys and didn't find anything.
- I've checked all sequences that begin with 'S' to see if they are valid private minikeys and no dice (shorena checked one recently as well).
- I have pulled likely sequences out of the character string and checked to see if they are TOR addresses, and none of them have worked (that was a long shot since the puzzle is mixed case).
- I've taken some stabs at SHA hashing 80 bit sequences from the dots to get TOR addresses, which has also failed (non-exhaustive).
- I have been systematically brute forcing the dot bitstring to attempt to coax ASCII messages out of it, but haven't gotten anywhere.
- Braille does not fit the puzzle due to the number of columns. There have been assertions that morse code does not work, but I haven't attempted this myself.
- ignoring the blue dot.
- poetry conversions.
- using brute force on the current complete data set.
- using the imgur id as data.
