Natasha Otomoski puzzle, 1 BTC

January 12, 2019. A BitcoinTalk account called blockladder opens a thread with "Ok, here's a 1BTC puzzle." and one line of question:

WhyTheCombOfNatashaOtomoskiHas21Teeth?.txt

That's it. No picture, no riddle chain, no second clue. Just a comb, a woman nobody heard of, and a file extension. And 1 BTC on the address.

How the Natasha Otomoski puzzle works

The answer is the key

The rules fit in two lines. "The solution is a 32 characters long plain-text (the private key)." And the hint: "8 camel case english words, no special symbols".

So no hashing. Take the 32 characters, read their ASCII bytes as one 256-bit number, done. That's the private key. Uncompressed P2PKH on top. The record tags it ascii-private-key. No salt, no rounds, nothing.

Sounds easy? Eight English words, camel case, exactly 32 letters. Pick the wrong one and you get a random address and zero feedback.

Signed, so it's real

People asked for proof first. Fair. The post carries a signature, and on January 15 Thirdspace pasted the whole thing as a signed message for 179sxfh6rw6bHSo5wVUhLP96k46QaEzVP. Valid. The money was there an hour before the thread, so the record says preGenesis: true.

Satoshi, a comb and big.txt

The thread ran for months. Natasha Otomoski is an anagram of Satoshi Nakamoto. watashi-kokoto lined the letters up the same evening, number by number. 21 teeth, 21 million coins? Somebody went there too.

SirVladimir took the .txt literally. Google the question with filetype:txt and you land on big.txt, a corpus with War and Peace inside. Natasha Rostova, a gold comb, married at 21. That's a great theory. It was also wrong.

Who solved the Natasha Otomoski puzzle

The prize moves first

August 21, 2019. Adriano2010 spots the spend before it confirms. 0.99996681 BTC goes to 36T9H8hJP7xexevqayU9ADxGca7Y5dKquQ in block 591,125, at 17:05:02 UTC. Seven months and a bit after the post.

The words come the next morning

At 08:52 on August 22 akkort posts one line:

SheHadTheIdeaWhileCombingHerHair

Thirty-two characters. Eight words. "If creator make new puzzle with the same rules I will publish how I found solition". 3eroCold says that isn't the answer. akkort replies with the WIF and its decoded bytes, and the bytes spell the sentence. Case closed.

Nobody liked the answer

It answers how, not why. BearCorsar said exactly that. zielar spent almost a month on it and wasn't happy. GBT_User congratulated "whoever found it (if it wasn't blockladder himself)". Ouch.

akkort called the method probabilistic and kept it. A new puzzle with the same rules would prove they weren't the creator, they said. blockladder never posted again. So the method is still a secret. Was it a word list and a lot of guessing? Maybe. Nobody knows.

What the Natasha Otomoski record carries

A published key, not a rebuilt one

ligor posted the hex, akkort posted the WIF. Both are on the record as published, so no .derived(). verify() turns the hex into the address and says OK.

export const natashaOtomoskiQuestion = puzzle({
  id: "natasha-otomoski",
  chain: "bitcoin",
  address: "179sxfh6rw6bHSo5wVUhLP96k46QaEzVP",
  sourceUrl: THREAD,
  startedAt: "2019-01-12 10:33:13",
  preGenesis: true,
  status: Status.Solved,
  pubkey: uncompressed("042b0763e8ce0c77dc0ac7511a0cc5c2...e363ab6f9a"),
  key: hex("536865486164546865496465615768696c65436f6d62696e6748657248616972").wif(
    "5JT281eare7tuC1v659kZRdJT91zyAR7XkuXsFibjpHa4BcSQRW",
  ),
  techniques: [technique("ascii-private-key", ANNOUNCEMENT)],
  prize: 1,
});

The question carries its answer

The question is an official hint, and akkort's line hangs on it as its answer, with its own post and date. The hint text stays exactly as blockladder wrote it. The anagram is a community hint, because the author never confirmed it.

Solved, with dust after

A claim plus a published key is solved. In May 2026 someone dropped 780 satoshis on the address and swept them in the same block. The key is public, so anyone could. The record keeps both, so puzzles watch has nothing to report.

The Natasha Otomoski record

puzzle({
  chain: "bitcoin",
  address: "179sxfh6rw6b…46QaEzVP",
  status: Status.Solved,
  key: hex("536865486164…48616972").wif("5JT281eare7t…a4BcSQRW"),
})