Building an awesome eCash community

March 1, 2025. cain posts Building an awesome eCash community and a chance to win 5M XEC on Proof Of Writing, the eCash site where readers pay writers in XEC. Three minutes of reading. Community, engagement, trust, a church on Sundays. Where's the puzzle? Nowhere. Just "a chance to win" in the title and not a word more.

That morning 5,000,000 XEC lands in a Cashtab wallet. Then nothing happens for a year and a half, except the prize keeps growing. 30,068,000.94 XEC by August 2026, gone in one transaction on August 26.

Two hints

First one, Revelations 22:13. "I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last." Looks like a nice quote for an essay about belief. It's actually the whole puzzle, packed in one verse.

Second one came with the relaunch on April 14, 2026. cain moved the article to the new Proof Of Writing, put the address on top and added: "It can be solved without ai or a computer". Plus 10M XEC that morning, 10M more in June and 5M on August 20. That last 5M had six days of life left.

The diagonal

Alpha and Omega, first and last. So you need a start and an end. The start is Matter, the first word of the second paragraph. The end is the paragraph about people "who show up because they believe". Twelve paragraphs between them, and then you go down the diagonal: word 1 from the first one, word 2 from the second, word 3 from the third, all the way to word 12 from the twelfth.

Nine words are straight from the BIP39 list. Three need a haircut: swamped, subjecting and friends lose their endings. Checksum passes too, which a random twelve does only once in sixteen tries. And yes, pen and paper are enough to find all of it. cain wasn't bluffing.

"What a trip" as the last word. Honestly, hard to write a better ending for this puzzle.

Path 1899, not 899

Twelve words and you're done? Not really. eCash's registered coin type is 899, so every textbook tells you m/44'/899'/0'/0/0. That address is empty, never funded. Cashtab has made every new wallet on m/44'/1899'/0'/0/0 since March 2024, and that's where the prize was sitting. So you can have the right seed, check the textbook path, see zero and throw the answer away. Same trap as the Movie Enigma checksum, one level deeper.

Ori didn't throw it away. 30,067,980.76 XEC left on August 26, 2026 at 23:41 UTC, the "Solved" post went up the next day, and the seed with the method a few hours after that. cain updated the article with the news and a link to the post.

What the Proof Of Writing record carries

export const ecashCommunity = ecashPuzzle({
  id: "proof-of-writing",
  address: p2pkh("ecash:qq5r308v2mkh6x5mkqpr6wytszz6f9r7qcnfttev0z", "2838bcec…a4947e06"),
  sourceUrl: ARTICLE,
  startedAt: "2025-03-01 08:32:39",
  status: Status.Solved,
  pubkey: compressed("0257eaa8…31b7f48b6d"),
  key: seed("matter key easily slot maple two visa swamp subject friend robust trip", "m/44'/1899'/0'/0/0"),
  prize: 30068000.94,
  hints: [
    official("Revelations 22:13", ARTICLE, undefined, { answer: answer("The clue \"Alpha and Omega\" defines paragraphs …", SOLUTION, { date: "2026-08-27" }) }),
    official("It can be solved without ai or a computer", ARTICLE, undefined, { date: "2026-04-14" }),
  ],
  transactions: [funding(/* 2025-03-01, 5M XEC */), decrease(/* 2025-09-29 */), increase(/* four more */), claim(/* 2026-08-26 */)],
  solver: party("Ori", { key: "oritwoen", … }),
  assets: assets({ puzzle: "puzzle.txt", sourceUrl: CAPTURE }),
});

The first eCash record

New chain in the dataset. ecashPuzzle puts the record on ecash: CashAddr with the ecash: prefix, XEC with two decimals, and verify() walks the seed down the recorded path, 1899 and all. puzzles verify proof-of-writing says OK. Nice to see after all that.

A round trip in September

September 29, 2025, a small heart attack for anyone watching the address. 5,059,096.41 XEC goes out. Thirteen hours later 5,058,997.76 XEC comes back, both times with the XECX token along for the ride. Only the key holder could sign the first one, so it's a decrease, not a claim. False alarm, the puzzle stayed open.

What the transactions leave out

Sixty-eight deposits of 1,000 XEC, most of them in March and July 2025, all but one with a PAY marker in the OP_RETURN. Small, and nobody called them prize money, so the record keeps the four real deposits and the round trip and skips the rest. They still count in prize, because that's what the claim transaction spent.

The text

Here the text is the puzzle, so it's in the repo. assets/proof-of-writing/puzzle.txt is the essay as the Wayback Machine saw it on March 27, 2025, the title and fourteen paragraphs. Want the version with the seed words bolded and capitalized? That one is on the new site, behind 100 XEC.

The Proof Of Writing record

ecashPuzzle({
  address: p2pkh("ecash:qq5r30…nfttev0z", "2838bcec56ed…a4947e06"),
  status: Status.Solved,
  key: seed("matter key e…ust trip", "m/44'/1899'/0'/0/0"),
})