q

Who this is

One letter. That's the whole handle. q grabbed it back when Stacker News was new and single letters were still up for grabs, and q was just the first random one nobody had taken. No hidden meaning, q says so in the thread. A bit disappointing for a puzzle author, but honest.

October 6, 2023. q posts Brute force and the coins are yours. A bitaddress.org paper wallet from years back, BIP38 encrypted, passphrase gone. q already went through the old passwords and got nothing. So instead of letting the coins sit there forever, q hands them to anyone who can guess better.

And there's a message in it. The passphrase is "not an extra security layer", q says, just an extra step before the coins go to every bitcoiner. Pretty brave take on your own wallet. Also a great sales pitch for a puzzle, and the coins are still there, so the passphrase isn't exactly agreeing.

What the record says

Three facts, from the post and one reply. The wallet with the forgotten passphrase. The point about passphrases. The story behind the name. What q remembers about the passphrase itself isn't here, that's hints on the puzzle record, because it's about the puzzle, not about q.

The record

static readonly author = party("q", {
  key: "q",
  kind: PartyKind.Person,
  about: "Stacker News account that gave away a paper wallet whose BIP38 passphrase it had forgotten, …",
  profiles: [profile("stackernews", "https://stacker.news/q")],
  facts: [
    fact("Posted the encrypted key and the address of a bitaddress.org paper wallet made some years earlier, …", THREAD, { date: "2023-10-06" }),
    fact("Called the giveaway a demonstration that a passphrase is not an extra security layer, …", THREAD, { date: "2023-10-06" }),
    fact("Took the name q when Stacker News was new and single letters were still free, …", comment("276411"), { date: "2023-10-06" }),
  ],
});