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Bitcoin puzzle #66 was solved: 6.6 BTC (~$400k) withdrawn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Re: Bitcoin puzzle #66 was solved: 6.6 BTC (~$400k) withdrawn

#151

Post by Jach »

nephanth wrote: post #68
sammy2255 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if it’s 100% green energy? Is it a waste?

Yes? If the energy could be used for something productive, but is instead used for something unproductive, then it is a waste While that energy technically serves the purpose of letting a monetary system function, traditional monetary infrastructure requires vastly smaller amounts of energy, thus this is a wasteful use of it

Last time I did some numbers, bank of america spent around $1bn per year in cybersecurity alone, and bitcoin mining energy cost about 10x that. For ensuring the security of a trustless worldwide monetary system, it's not that bad in comparison.

Re: Bitcoin puzzle #66 was solved: 6.6 BTC (~$400k) withdrawn

#152

Post by drexlspivey »

fernandopj wrote: post #148
mrb wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No private key was posted too early. What happened is the person who spent all the computing power to brute force the 66 bits broadcasted, naively, a transaction to send the 6.6 BTC reward to his wallet. However, when doing so, the public key is by design revealed on the blockchain. Someone's bot whose sole purpose is to steal this puzzles rewards was monitoring the blockchain and spotted the transaction before it go…

But how could he have avoided this attack? I'm only familiar with Bitcoin's blockchain on a begginner level. But I assume the only way would be to avoid revealing the answer key (public) when sending the transaction to get the reward?

One way would be to not broadcast the transaction publicly but send it to a mining pool directly

Re: Bitcoin puzzle #66 was solved: 6.6 BTC (~$400k) withdrawn

#153

Post by hoerzu »

fernandopj wrote: post #148
mrb wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No private key was posted too early. What happened is the person who spent all the computing power to brute force the 66 bits broadcasted, naively, a transaction to send the 6.6 BTC reward to his wallet. However, when doing so, the public key is by design revealed on the blockchain. Someone's bot whose sole purpose is to steal this puzzles rewards was monitoring the blockchain and spotted the transaction before it go…

But how could he have avoided this attack? I'm only familiar with Bitcoin's blockchain on a begginner level. But I assume the only way would be to avoid revealing the answer key (public) when sending the transaction to get the reward?

Private mempool transaction

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

#154

Post by Stagnant »

mrb wrote: post #136
arcanemachiner wrote: post #90

Looks like the coins were stolen by a bot: > https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1306983.msg64535839#... I'm not super familiar with the concept (and I'm too lazy to look into it TBH), but I think the would-be winner posted the private key before enough (any?) blocks were mined, and the thief posted a transaction with a bigger fee, and the thief's transaction was in the block that got mined.

No private key was posted too early. What happened is the person who spent all the computing power to brute force the 66 bits broadcasted, naively, a transaction to send the 6.6 BTC reward to his wallet. However, when doing so, the public key is by design revealed on the blockchain. Someone's bot whose sole purpose is to steal this puzzles rewards was monitoring the blockchain and spotted the transaction before it go…

That is correct. Basically you have to get lucky that after submitting the transaction a new block would be confirmed within 1-2 minutes which I think is around the timeframe what it will take for a top consumer GPU to bruteforce the private key.

I'd be curious to know if it is possible at all to "securely" send the funds of these puzzles or if there is some hard limit that requires the pubkey to be published with the transaction.

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

#155

Post by Dibby053 »

mrb wrote: post #136
arcanemachiner wrote: post #90

Looks like the coins were stolen by a bot: > https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1306983.msg64535839#... I'm not super familiar with the concept (and I'm too lazy to look into it TBH), but I think the would-be winner posted the private key before enough (any?) blocks were mined, and the thief posted a transaction with a bigger fee, and the thief's transaction was in the block that got mined.

No private key was posted too early. What happened is the person who spent all the computing power to brute force the 66 bits broadcasted, naively, a transaction to send the 6.6 BTC reward to his wallet. However, when doing so, the public key is by design revealed on the blockchain. Someone's bot whose sole purpose is to steal this puzzles rewards was monitoring the blockchain and spotted the transaction before it go…

That must hurt. In case I crack the next puzzle... how should I go about collecting the prize without having to mine a block myself or trust a miner not to screw me over?

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

#156

Post by Biganon »

red_admiral wrote: post #99
CaptainOfCoit wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Step 2.5 Argue with Coinbase about if you're a legitimate owner or not Step 2.6 Coinbase blocks your account citing "Suspicious activity" Step 2.7 Sign up to three other exchanges, split the loot across them Step 5 Argue with the bank about the source of funds Step 6 Argue with tax agency that you'll fill out your taxes correctly

For something like $10k-20k I bet you could get someone (good lawyer?) to solve those problems for you, leaving you with $399-398k. Worth the deal, I think.

The math doesn't check out

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

#157

Post by Jerrrrrrry »

fernandopj wrote: post #148
mrb wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No private key was posted too early. What happened is the person who spent all the computing power to brute force the 66 bits broadcasted, naively, a transaction to send the 6.6 BTC reward to his wallet. However, when doing so, the public key is by design revealed on the blockchain. Someone's bot whose sole purpose is to steal this puzzles rewards was monitoring the blockchain and spotted the transaction before it go…

But how could he have avoided this attack? I'm only familiar with Bitcoin's blockchain on a begginner level. But I assume the only way would be to avoid revealing the answer key (public) when sending the transaction to get the reward?

There is actually no way to avoid this, aside from setting the Fee nearly to the reward.

It's essentially MitM all the way down.

even the private mempool can attempt a double-spend with a larger fee, get one transaction ahead, then try to maintain an edge long enough to be the "longest branch" for consensus - the 51% attack only needs 33% in reality, much less when your the private mempool that can take advantage of the birthday paradox to jump two blocks ahead.

you have to literally mine your own coin with the reward transaction included.

of course, zpk+ would solve this issue entirely.

Alice and Bob wouldn't ever doubt each other again.

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

#158

Post by iJohnDoe »

Can someone EILI5?

I thought cracking anything to steal bitcoin was impossible due to the keys sizes involved? Is this possible because a portion of the key is already available so there is less to crack?

Which key is known? The public or private? Another comment said the “now known public” but then also said the private key can now be recovered by cracking it? Two keys need to be cracked?

What kind computing power is needed to crack both keys and how long?

Thanks. Sorry, I’m an idiot when it comes to bitcoin.

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

#159

Post by cmcaleer »

doctorwhat wrote: post #23
ivanjermakov wrote: post #18

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...

Prize pool would have to be much more than $400k to justify a state actor flexing that kind of capability, NK makes far more than that exploiting DeFi protocols.

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

#160

Post by mmsc »

thundergolfer wrote: post #106

We had fraudsters using modal.com compute to solve this challenge. It's not traditional mining software so it didn't initially get flagged, but we've updated our detection to catch it now[1]. 1. https://modal.com/blog/catching-cryptominers

Your blog 404s when an iPhone user uses lockdown mode. In fact your whole website fails to load.
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