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Bitcoin puzzle #66 was solved: 6.6 BTC (~$400k) withdrawn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Re: Bitcoin puzzle #66 was solved: 6.6 BTC (~$400k) withdrawn

#251

Post by dgellow »

motoxpro wrote: post #144
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…

As much as this sucks, I absolutely love how the blockchain is real life version of a Dark Forest

As long as it isn’t used for anything in the real world, I agree. It’s a fascinating ecosystem to watch from far away. If the crypto bros get their way and integrate blockchains with the real world, that becomes a horror show

Re: Bitcoin puzzle #66 was solved: 6.6 BTC (~$400k) withdrawn

#252

Post by Quindecillion »

throwaway314155 wrote: post #207
throwawayffffas wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not particularly intriguing, he is trash talking the competition.

that it's relatively self aware, in particular about energy consumption concerns, is mildly intriguing i think

What's wrong with energy consumption?

I think you might be confusing it with greenhouse gas emissions.

Re: Bitcoin puzzle #66 was solved: 6.6 BTC (~$400k) withdrawn

#253

Post by stavros »

zeagle wrote: post #206
a_dabbler wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to. Most of us will never understand the complexity of banking either

You mean the one where someone else pays a higher ATM fee and scoops my cheque deposit? We can talk about reduced bits in the puzzle vs a regular transaction but when you need to consider how you are going to safely claim your money as if you are laundering you have to admit this is a little nuts.

You're discounting how nuts it is that a third party has veto over whether you can spend your money and how.

Re: Bitcoin puzzle #66 was solved: 6.6 BTC (~$400k) withdrawn

#254

Post by ralfd »

csomar wrote: post #220
exhilaration wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was this left by the person who solved it or the one who stole the prize? See below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41549946

If the real puzzle solver didn't see this coming, he kinda does deserve it. Bitcoin blocks takes 10-20 minutes to confirm. This leaves enough time for a bot/human to take over. I am pretty sure he could have contacted a miner/pool and arranged a deal with them.

Can you explain that? So the real puzzle solver could have theoretically triggered the transaction, but lurking bots are stealing the transaction from them?

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

#255

Post by zikduruqe »

mapt wrote: post #32
mrb wrote: 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…

Am I correct in assuming that beyond a certain point, this is basically an existence proof for somebody having a quantum-supreme solution to Shor's Algorithm? "Here's $400,000 sitting on the table, hope nobody takes it" which triggers an alarm telling us to replace all our old prequantum cryptography.

That, or it is a trap to catch time travelers. :)

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

#256

Post by GTP »

arcastroe wrote: post #200
sltkr wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither of which helps with elliptic curve cryptography.

the problem of finding discrete logarithms is the same problem as breaking elliptic curve cryptography.

Technically, while the two problems share the same name, the one on elliptic curves is matematically different from the one over finite fields modulo a prime number.

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

#257

Post by GTP »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #128
oniony wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except your analogy doesn't work because every single bitcoin address has the same brand of lock.

Each key is a brand in the analogy.

Why should the analogy consider each key as a different brand of lock? Each key needs to be cracked separately, but you can use the same method for all of them (assuming one finds a general method and not one based on some property that only a subset of the keys has). So it should be akin to locks of the same brand, using different keys to open them. But that, being of the same brand, can be picked in the same way.

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

#258

Post by fidelramos »

HPsquared wrote: post #243
mrb wrote: 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…

So exponential increase in difficulty, linear increase in reward. Unless the price goes exponential too! (Which was the case for a while)

My take on this [0] is that Bitcoin price was growing exponentially with demand, or more exactly with the expected future demand. Cryptocurrency always have had a lot of speculation behind them, not unlike any startup, and that is OK.

As shown by the graph [0], adoption slowed down after 2016 when BTC blocks got consistently full and transaction fees rose to $50 and more. I believe if BTC had scaled to support more transactions the price would be much higher today, as Bitcoin would likely be used as a means of payment across the Internet and in many physical stores at well.

Discussions regarding the decentralization of larger blocks aside, something that is not clear to many people is that scaling a blockchain to handle more transactions doesn't mean a linear increase in energy use. In the case of BTC its Proof-of-Work algorithm operates over the root of the last block's Merkle tree, which is a hash of all the transactions in the block. Being a fixed-size hash it doesn't matter if the block contains 1,000, 1 million or 1 billion transactions. Arguably a more popular Bitcoin would be more valuable and therefore would attract more miners, increasing its energy consumption, but that just reinforces my original point.

[0] https://x.com/ampajaro/status/1782850107529973990

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

#259

Post by GTP »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #246
mapt wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I correct in assuming that beyond a certain point, this is basically an existence proof for somebody having a quantum-supreme solution to Shor's Algorithm? "Here's $400,000 sitting on the table, hope nobody takes it" which triggers an alarm telling us to replace all our old prequantum cryptography.

Not necessarily, if there's e.g. a trillion keys to try, every tried key as a 1 in 1-trillion chance to be it, so it could be found by chance after just one try. (disclaimer, I don't know statistics, cryptography, bitcoin or chances)

Yes, but in your example the probability of finding it at the first try would be one in a trillion, which is already so small to be negligible. And 2^66 is much bigger than that.

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

#260

Post by fidelramos »

csomar wrote: post #220
exhilaration wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was this left by the person who solved it or the one who stole the prize? See below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41549946

If the real puzzle solver didn't see this coming, he kinda does deserve it. Bitcoin blocks takes 10-20 minutes to confirm. This leaves enough time for a bot/human to take over. I am pretty sure he could have contacted a miner/pool and arranged a deal with them.

How could a bot/human steal the funds without knowing the private key?

Edit: typo

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