Have you ever heard of the puzzle "The Legend of Satoshi Nakamoto"? A contest published in 2015 that hid a Bitcoin private key containing 4.87 BTC (about 500k at today's exchange rate). The puzzle was created by cryptographer Marguerite deCourcelle in collaboration with visual artist Rob Myers. The image looked like a fantasy artwork, but in reality it contained cryptographic elements embedded in the graphics: symbols, colors, patterns and hidden numbers. The image contained visual and steganographic clues encoded to lead to a Bitcoin private key. No explicit information was present: the private key had to be deduced through reasoning.
After almost 3 years, the puzzle was solved by an anonymous user thanks to image analysis (to detect binary patterns) and decoding in Base58 (format used for Bitcoin private keys). Almost 5 BTC were worth 50k.
HOW WAS THE PUZZLE SOLVED?
The private key was in "WIF" format with "Base58" encoding. WIF is a compressed and encoded format used to represent a Bitcoin private key more securely. It includes a prefix (to indicate the network), the actual private key, and a checksum to detect errors. All of this has been encoded in Base58Check. Base58 is an encoding system used by Bitcoin to avoid similar characters (such as "0" and "O", "I" and "l") and supports alphanumeric format, apart from those exceptions. It is used to make strings more readable and less prone to errors when copying or transcribing.
So: WIF = private key + metadata, encoded in Base58Check.
1) The private key is hidden in the frame (flame: red, yellow, short, long, narrow, long, purple or green inside. Each represents 0 or 1. Starting from the top, going from left to right you get a sequence of 0 and 1 based on the type of flame).
2) A key character was the red ribbon at the bottom right that formed a 6-bit cipher useful for decoding the information (short red ribbon = 0, the long one = 1). The cipher applies the XOR operator (or exclusive OR) to groups of 6.
3) Convert bits to decimal numbers.
4) ASCII encoding (transforms decimals into letters).
5) Obtain private key with 4.87 BTC.
So the operations were to get the bits of all the flames from left to right (in the image there are the first 3 flames), break them down into groups of 6, apply the cipher key for each one (obtained from the red ribbon) that is the XOR operator, add all the binary digits obtained from the XOR operator (long series of 0 and 1), convert the bits into decimal numbers (each group of 8 bits/digits becomes a decimal number: 01000010=66) and use econding ascii (which transforms the numbers into letters, 66=B. The letters make up the private key).
Not easy but almost 5 BTC were worth the attempt! I think these stories are always of great value because they teach you to reason by improving your visual and mental ability. If tomorrow you found yourself in front of a similar contest you would know at least, on a visual level, how to reason!
Are you interested in ways to earn crypto bonus? Check it out here: Some Sites To Earn Crypto Bonus (Old & New)
