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Bitcoin puzzle #66 was solved: 6.6 BTC (~$400k) withdrawn

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Re: Bitcoin puzzle #66 was solved: 6.6 BTC (~$400k) withdrawn

#23

Who is paying to the puzzle solvers?

Three letters agencies? Could be a nice way to find out if a foreign entity has an enormous brute-force capability? But more likely I'd say they got their bitcoin back when a core2duo was enough to generate a few of them overnight...

Re: Bitcoin puzzle #66 was solved: 6.6 BTC (~$400k) withdrawn

#24
post #2

Discussion thread here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1306983.msg64526037#... Bitcoin puzzles are private keys with just a few unknown bits so that anyone can bruteforce them to collect a reward. Puzzle 66 contained 66 unknown bits and had 6.6 BTC deposited into it by the initial puzzle creator. The private key was 0x000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000002832ed74f2b5e35ee or 256 bits with mostly ze…

Is this a "puzzle"? Throwing compute at brute-forcing a random number doesn't seem like solving a puzzle to me, it's basically how bitcoin works.

A lot of puzzles (e.g. sudoku) are things you could solve with a SAT/SMT solver

Re: Bitcoin puzzle #66 was solved: 6.6 BTC (~$400k) withdrawn

#27
post #2

Discussion thread here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1306983.msg64526037#... Bitcoin puzzles are private keys with just a few unknown bits so that anyone can bruteforce them to collect a reward. Puzzle 66 contained 66 unknown bits and had 6.6 BTC deposited into it by the initial puzzle creator. The private key was 0x000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000002832ed74f2b5e35ee or 256 bits with mostly ze…

For those curious, the reason why a public key lets you find a private key more efficiently is Pollard's rho algorithm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollard%27s_rho_algorithm_for_...
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