The Legend of Satoshi Nakamato, FINAL STEP PUBLISHED.... 4.87 BTC GRAND PRIZE!

[RealOnTheMF]

This thread seems pretty active again, so I figured I'd post some recent findings in hopes we can all solve this thing.

I found a bacon (v2) message within the height bit-stream that when decoded appears to be "thefm auriskeyfile".

This is a  real breakthrough, thanks for sharing this.

Edit: Where did you find the code for bacon? Wrote it yourself?

Yes, I just wrote it myself. It's basically binary mapped to a-z. The version in the code above is Bacon version 2 which does not skip i and v.

[Uncle Entity]

I think I have figured out what the chess pieces are about. Was that figured out years ago, I didn't see it mentioned here yet..?

No, no one has said anything provable about the chess pieces, just theories. Care to say what you think they mean?

They're probably Queen Elizabeth I and Robert Devereux, Master of the Horse whom Shakespeare wrote the poem about (in one interpretation).

[itod]

I think I have figured out what the chess pieces are about. Was that figured out years ago, I didn't see it mentioned here yet..?

No, no one has said anything provable about the chess pieces, just theories. Care to say what you think they mean?

They're probably Queen Elizabeth I and Robert Devereux, Master of the Horse whom Shakespeare wrote the poem about (in one interpretation).

Interesting. Which poem is that?

[bigmattyh]

This thread seems pretty active again, so I figured I'd post some recent findings in hopes we can all solve this thing. ...

That's really interesting. I coded up my own version of this, and it's definitely there.

XOR'ing the key against the heights makes a lot of sense. Was there any rationale to the order you picked the flames? Or what led you to drop one of the flames to make it work (other than to make the math work out)?

[itod]

I'm curious if you know which flames in what order produced that? Should have been 90 flames right.

Guess i'm gonna start trying to xor flame lengths with the ribbon and try to reproduce that.

It's given by this line in the code:

Code:

encrypted_track = [ib_l2r, il_t2b, ir_t2b, it_r2l, ot_r2l, ob_l2r];

i = inner
o = outer
l = left
r = right
b = bottom
t = top
r = right

So, ib_l2r means inner bottom left to right.

When you visualize the order and direction of reading the flames:



The order doesn't match the spiral signs in the corners, which we all assumed is the indication of the direction. Notice that 2 out of 8 flame lines (outer left and right) are still unused. I wonder if there are more messages in the outer/inner color bit-streams.

[RealOnTheMF]

This thread seems pretty active again, so I figured I'd post some recent findings in hopes we can all solve this thing. ...

That's really interesting. I coded up my own version of this, and it's definitely there.

XOR'ing the key against the heights makes a lot of sense. Was there any rationale to the order you picked the flames? Or what led you to drop one of the flames to make it work (other than to make the math work out)?

The order was found through a search. As I mentioned before, I'm skeptical this is a real message. If anything I believe we may have stumbled upon a collision of the intended cipher, but not the true decryption method.

Initially the order seemed strange but, we rationalized it with the symbolism from the knight and bishop. Knights make jump moves in chess, hence the every 5th bit approach, and bishops move diagonally, hence the diagonal connection of the segments.

The glyphs we believed symbolized the modulus operation required to "unwind" the data. Figuratively, you are "spiraling" around the border of the painting. While this is all very well and good, we've been unable to make any progress on this theory. It was my belief that the message properly decoded would read "thecolouriskeyfile", which would indicate the inner and outer colour tracks would be decrypted by following the same steps as with the height track. The British spelling of "colour" seemed reasonable because the Rob Myers guy is a filthy Canadian, and CoinArtist seemed to have EU heritage, although I couldn't find anything definitive.

[clanestutr]

I'm having trouble reproducing the length XOR decode. My understanding from crax0r's breakdown is: you concat the length bits in this order:

Inner Bottom, L2R
Inner Left, T2B
Inner Right, T2B
Inner Top, R2L
Outer Top, R2L
OuterBottom, L2R

Based on this, Inner Bottom L2R is

Code:

011111011111011111011010001110001

XOR'ing with 011010 (starting with second bit) gives us:

Code:

0 111110 111110 111110 110100 011100 01
- 011010 011010 011010 011010 011010 011010 

- 100100 100100 100100 101110 000110 

Then we run that through the v2 Bacon cipher, (omitting a character?)

Code:

- 100100 100100 100100 101110 000110 
- 10010x 10010x 10010x 10111x 00011x
- S, S, S, -, D

Or, if we don't omit any characters and simply take them 5 bits at a time:

Code:

- 100100 100100 100100 101110 000110 
- 10010 01001 00100 10010 11100 00110 
- S, J, E, S, nil, G

And/or shifting 1 so 00000 = nil but 00001 = A. Regardless, I can't reproduce any of the patterns here.

[RealOnTheMF]

You're missing the modulus operation. It's kind of hidden in a single line of code.

Matlab version:

Code:

message_indices = mod((0:(length(decrypted_track)-1)) * 5, length(decrypted_track)) + 1;

Equivalent in C/C++/Java would be:

Code:

for (int i = 0; i < n; i++)
    data[i] = orig_data[i * 5 % n];

[zbyszek2]

I'm having trouble reproducing the length XOR decode. My understanding from crax0r's breakdown is: you concat the length bits in this order:
....

a python (2.7) script for you (not the prettiest but it works):

Code:

#!/usr/bin/python

def splitString(s, size):
    return [s[i:i+size] for i  in range(0, len(s), size)]

bac = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ_______________________________________________________"; 
#      12345678901234567890123456

inner_short_long = ('0110110110100010110110110011','110111110110110111110010','100011100010110111110111110111110','0111001101101')
outer_short_long = ('001101100111001101','001111000101','0011111011010001','01101101')

(it_l2r, ir_t2b, ib_r2l, il_b2t) = inner_short_long
(ot_l2r, or_t2b, ob_r2l, ol_b2t) = outer_short_long
ib_l2r = ib_r2l[::-1]
il_t2b = il_b2t[::-1]
it_r2l = it_l2r[::-1]
ot_r2l = ot_l2r[::-1]
ob_l2r = ob_r2l[::-1]

rbn_l2r = '011010'

encrypted_track = "".join([ib_l2r, il_t2b, ir_t2b, it_r2l, ot_r2l, ob_l2r]);

print 'encrypted_track = ', encrypted_track
xor = (rbn_l2r * 22) [:-1]
print 'xor             =  ', xor

decrypted_track = ("{0:b}").format(int(encrypted_track, 2) ^ int(xor, 2))
print 'decrypted_track =  ', decrypted_track
indexed_track = (decrypted_track*5)[::5]
print 'indexed_track   =  ', indexed_track
splited_track = splitString(indexed_track,5)
print 'splited_trak    = ' , splited_track

print 'decoded bacon   = ' , [ bac[int(x,2)] for x in splited_track]

output:

Code:

encrypted_track =  011111011111011111011010001110001101101100111011011111011011011111001011001101101101000101101101101011001110011011001000101101111100
xor             =   01101001101001101001101001101001101001101001101001101001101001101001101001101001101001101001101001101001101001101001101001101001101
decrypted_track =   10010010010010010010111000011000000100001110110010010010110010010000110000000100000001000100000100110000011010110000101100000110001
indexed_track   =   10011001110010000101011001101000000101001000101000100100101000100110000010101000010110010010001000000000001001000101100000000011101
splited_trak    =  ['10011', '00111', '00100', '00101', '01100', '11010', '00000', '10100', '10001', '01000', '10010', '01010', '00100', '11000', '00101', '01000', '01011', '00100', '10001', '00000', '00000', '01001', '00010', '11000', '00000', '01110', '1']
decoded bacon   =  ['T', 'H', 'E', 'F', 'M', '_', 'A', 'U', 'R', 'I', 'S', 'K', 'E', 'Y', 'F', 'I', 'L', 'E', 'R', 'A', 'A', 'J', 'C', 'Y', 'A', 'O', 'B']

@RealOnTheMF - I'm impressed!

[bigmattyh]

It was my belief that the message properly decoded would read "thecolouriskeyfile", which would indicate the inner and outer colour tracks would be decrypted by following the same steps as with the height track. The British spelling of "colour" seemed reasonable because the Rob Myers guy is a filthy Canadian, and CoinArtist seemed to have EU heritage, although I couldn't find anything definitive.

Interesting -- and that would make sense too. The binary pattern we *have* is:

100110011100100001010110011010000001010010001010001001001010001001100000101010000101100100...

…and the one that *would* say "thecolouriskeyfile" is:

100110011100100000100111001011011101010010001010001001001010001001100000101010000101100100

Differences in bold. Maybe they got off somewhere in transcribing the pattern.

[feedo]

I think I have figured out what the chess pieces are about. Was that figured out years ago, I didn't see it mentioned here yet..?

No, no one has said anything provable about the chess pieces, just theories. Care to say what you think they mean?

They're probably Queen Elizabeth I and Robert Devereux, Master of the Horse whom Shakespeare wrote the poem about (in one interpretation).

Interesting. Which poem is that?

Read the (interpretations) in this page:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Chester_(poet)

[massl]

I've decoded the dusty inputs to the address. It says "BERCAICAREA" = french "bercail ce area" = fold THIS area (edit: see my correction below).
So, happy folding.

Only few lines of code needed.

Code:

#!/usr/bin/env python2
def toBaconCipher(text):
    ret = ""
    for character in text:
        ret += 'B' if int(character, 10) & 1 else 'A'
    return ret

baconCiphered = toBaconCipher(''.join(['00007799', '00005429', '00000001','00000001', '0000001', '0000001', '0000609', '00000001']))

print "bacon ciphered:", baconCiphered

(decode bacon cipher online)

EDIT: I have just been corrected, that "bercail" does not mean "to fold":

Code:

    (dated) fold (enclosure for animals)
    (figuratively, informal) house, home

        Tous les invités sont rentrés au bercail.
            All the guests have gone home.

[sini]

The symmetries in the ordering seems fairly consistent. Plus the chance you'd find that sequence of those words (and a missing word) is fairly low.


This would explain the high frequency of repeating 6-gram's being consistent with a vigenere cipher (xor). Because you have multiple repeating characters in the message.

[ghoom2]

It was my belief that the message properly decoded would read "thecolouriskeyfile", which would indicate the inner and outer colour tracks would be decrypted by following the same steps as with the height track. The British spelling of "colour" seemed reasonable because the Rob Myers guy is a filthy Canadian, and CoinArtist seemed to have EU heritage, although I couldn't find anything definitive.

Interesting -- and that would make sense too. The binary pattern we *have* is:

100110011100100001010110011010000001010010001010001001001010001001100000101010000101100100...

…and the one that *would* say "thecolouriskeyfile" is:

100110011100100000100111001011011101010010001010001001001010001001100000101010000101100100

Differences in bold. Maybe they got off somewhere in transcribing the pattern.

theflamesiskeyfile

[feedo]

It was my belief that the message properly decoded would read "thecolouriskeyfile", which would indicate the inner and outer colour tracks would be decrypted by following the same steps as with the height track. The British spelling of "colour" seemed reasonable because the Rob Myers guy is a filthy Canadian, and CoinArtist seemed to have EU heritage, although I couldn't find anything definitive.

Interesting -- and that would make sense too. The binary pattern we *have* is:

100110011100100001010110011010000001010010001010001001001010001001100000101010000101100100...

…and the one that *would* say "thecolouriskeyfile" is:

100110011100100000100111001011011101010010001010001001001010001001100000101010000101100100

Differences in bold. Maybe they got off somewhere in transcribing the pattern.

theflamesiskeyfile

LOL, the key file is not in those fucking trolling flames
And the creators could withdraw their btc any moment and no one could track them if they did that
In the end It's crypto currency and no one could track them

[clanestutr]

You're missing the modulus operation. It's kind of hidden in a single line of code.

Whoops. Yeah, missed that first time around.

The more I play around with the XOR patterns and permutations of row order/orientations, the less I think that these words are meaningful. It's a fairly unlikely coincidence, I admit, for "is" "the" & "keyfile" to appear, but those aren't particularly long words, with "keyfile" being the only exception.

But, perhaps more important--why would they use the term "keyfile" (or "key file") at all? The result wouldn't be a file, it would be a private key. I don't see the puzzle creators using a phrase like "keyfile" when "privkey" or even "key" would suffice, especially when "keyfile" is technically innacurate.

Not to mention generating this phrase requires a series convoluted steps:

1. Arrange 6 out of 8 rows in a pattern that doesn't appear anywhere else in the painting (to be fair, it may be undiscovered, but the bishop/knight explanation breaks down, for me. It's almost certainly a queen rather than a bishop, and the knight's movement is precise in a way that doesn't reflect the jumping around necessary for this row order/orientation)

2. XOR with 011010, but only after you skip the first bit entirely.

3. Cycle back to the beginning of the 6 rows and rinse/repeat.

What about the 011 pattern that tracks through all of the rows without deviation? Sure, it's possible to encode words and still have that pattern exist, but it's a hell of a lot harder, and--considering the route you have to take to generate the above phrase, seemingly unnecessary.

There are a lot of possible permutations, even between 6 out of 8 rows (upwards of 20,000). Maybe if "keyfile" made more sense to me, but I say it's just coincidence that these words exist here. Hell, look at how many scholars tried to prove Bacon was Shakespeare because they "found" his signature hidden in the texts. Everywhere. Those had equally convoluted rule-sets / approaches.

[colonel_koval]

It was my belief that the message properly decoded would read "thecolouriskeyfile", which would indicate the inner and outer colour tracks would be decrypted by following the same steps as with the height track. The British spelling of "colour" seemed reasonable because the Rob Myers guy is a filthy Canadian, and CoinArtist seemed to have EU heritage, although I couldn't find anything definitive.

Interesting -- and that would make sense too. The binary pattern we *have* is:

100110011100100001010110011010000001010010001010001001001010001001100000101010000101100100...

…and the one that *would* say "thecolouriskeyfile" is:

100110011100100000100111001011011101010010001010001001001010001001100000101010000101100100

Differences in bold. Maybe they got off somewhere in transcribing the pattern.

theflamesiskeyfile

guys, I would hate to cool your optimism down, but of course you realize that every second binary digit (5 of them coding every baconian letter) belongs to that crazy 0x1x1x pattern that is constant throughout the flames. It can't imagine the creator choosing letters and wording so carefullty, so that she can convey her intended message but chosen letters would not break the constant pattern.

On the other hand, it makes much sense what RealOnTheMF said, that it is a massive coincidence: doing the exhaustive search of all possible permutations of all subsets of 8 flame segments, accepting CW or CCW order of each segment, skipping every 1 flame or 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 or whatever threshold he chose as the upper limit, applying the 011010 XOR or not, excluding first k flames when applying the XOR (k=0,1,etc.) - what I am thinking that there were so many bit streams tested (milions would be my guess), that he simply stumbled upon the words that made sense. Not entirely made sense, as you can see. Even if the 'colour' is what was really intended, we don't have to do with a key file, but with a key itself, so the message really is more or less senseless.

[colonel_koval]

You're missing the modulus operation. It's kind of hidden in a single line of code.

Whoops. Yeah, missed that first time around.

The more I play around with the XOR patterns and permutations of row order/orientations, the less I think that these words are meaningful. It's a fairly unlikely coincidence, I admit, for "is" "the" & "keyfile" to appear, but those aren't particularly long words, with "keyfile" being the only exception.

But, perhaps more important--why would they use the term "keyfile" (or "key file") at all? The result wouldn't be a file, it would be a private key. I don't see the puzzle creators using a phrase like "keyfile" when "privkey" or even "key" would suffice, especially when "keyfile" is technically innacurate.

Not to mention generating this phrase requires a series convoluted steps:

1. Arrange 6 out of 8 rows in a pattern that doesn't appear anywhere else in the painting (to be fair, it may be undiscovered, but the bishop/knight explanation breaks down, for me. It's almost certainly a queen rather than a bishop, and the knight's movement is precise in a way that doesn't reflect the jumping around necessary for this row order/orientation)

2. XOR with 011010, but only after you skip the first bit entirely.

3. Cycle back to the beginning of the 6 rows and rinse/repeat.

What about the 011 pattern that tracks through all of the rows without deviation? Sure, it's possible to encode words and still have that pattern exist, but it's a hell of a lot harder, and--considering the route you have to take to generate the above phrase, seemingly unnecessary.

my thinking exactly, especially the keyFILE part

EDIT: actually, on the second thought and the second reading, my thinking entirely

[clanestutr]

my thinking exactly, especially the keyFILE part

EDIT: actually, on the second thought and the second reading, my thinking entirely

 

[bug.lady]

It was my belief that the message properly decoded would read "thecolouriskeyfile", which would indicate the inner and outer colour tracks would be decrypted by following the same steps as with the height track. The British spelling of "colour" seemed reasonable because the Rob Myers guy is a filthy Canadian, and CoinArtist seemed to have EU heritage, although I couldn't find anything definitive.

Interesting -- and that would make sense too. The binary pattern we *have* is:

100110011100100001010110011010000001010010001010001001001010001001100000101010000101100100...

…and the one that *would* say "thecolouriskeyfile" is:

100110011100100000100111001011011101010010001010001001001010001001100000101010000101100100

Differences in bold. Maybe they got off somewhere in transcribing the pattern.

Maybe they got off somewhere in transcribing the pattern ... and then again ... and then again ...