There is a factor known as “Bitcoin Puzzles” the place somebody (nameless) has positioned comparatively giant quantities of bitcoin beneath personal keys and publicly marketed that these keys are mostly-all-bits-zero. So the sport is to find the mostly-zero personal key by brute power, after which declare the bitcoin.
However after all claiming the bitcoin requires submitting a transaction to the pool, and that transaction goes to incorporate the corresponding public key; and (for math causes I’ve not investigated personally) if the general public key then the issue of brute-forcing the personal key goes from 2^{okay} right down to one thing like 2^{okay/2} — i.e., instantaneous, for the variety of nonzero bits we’re speaking about in these puzzles.
So, when Bitcoin Puzzle #66 was lately solved, it was shortly rumored that what had actually occurred was:
Principle #1, the intelligent bot
- Some poor man spends years brute-forcing a 66-bit personal key.
- He submits a transaction, together with the general public key, asking for six.6BTC to be transferred from the prize deal with to himself.
- Some random bot has been watching the pool for years for precisely this second. The bot takes a number of tens of seconds to brute-force the now-effectively-33-bit personal key, and submits its personal transaction consuming the identical enter however with the next transaction price
- The bot’s transaction thus replaces the poor man’s transaction, and is mined, giving the prize cash to the bot. Poor man spent years of brute-force time for nothing.
However after all there are not less than two competing theories:
Principle #2, the boring one
- Some man spends years brute-forcing a 66-bit personal key. He submits the transaction; no person front-runs him; he simply made $400,000. The tip.
Principle #3, the puzzlemaster cheated
- The nameless puzzlemaster, who is aware of all of the personal keys by definition, may have submitted his personal transaction to take out the cash at any time (say, to purchase one other home). That may look the identical as if anybody else brute-forced the puzzle legitimately; so so far as proof goes, Principle #3 is indistinguishable from Principle #2.
The entire Bitcoin Puzzle addresses are (apparently) listed right here:
https://privatekeyfinder.io/bitcoin-puzzle
That is the deal with for Bitcoin Puzzle #66:
https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/btc/13zb1hQbWVsc2S7ZTZnP2G4undNNpdh5so
And that is the successful transaction (IIUC):
https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/transactions/btc/57a88f47e4c047740b782a5562fca143ce85de0373cbff3a7d406e9ae7fc2f5f
My query is, Is there any “bodily proof” remaining which may corroborate which concept is right? Particularly, if there have been one thing like blockchain.com/explorer for unconfirmed transactions, then we may take a look at it and say “Oh, that is fascinating; an unconfirmed transaction in opposition to the prize deal with at 18:57:00 with a 50000-sat price, adopted by one other unconfirmed transaction at 18:59:20 with a 75000-sat price, after which a confirmed transaction at 18:59:39 with a 76400-sat price, after which a number of extra invalid transactions within the 5 minutes after that.” — That would be sturdy proof for Principle #1 (IIUC); however so far as I do know, there is no public (or dependable personal) report that will have the ability to present that type of info — proper?
…Truly, I simply discovered this stacker.information story, which factors to an unconfirmed transaction 8c8ec6b and hyperlinks to a web page on mempool.area/tx as corroboration of Principle #1. That web page is… effectively, it is gone now. And it was by no means archived by the Wayback Machine nor by archive.is. So I assume I is perhaps asking whether or not there’s some other historic report of the data ephemerally out there on mempool.area; or maybe some subset of such info “of historic curiosity.”
