Quizchain Real Big Block

July 22, 2019. AoiNakamoto posts the last block of the Quizchain. "Thank you for playing the quizchain." Then the prize: 777 mBTC. Over a hundred times the usual 7 mBTC block.

The question is one line. "Final version of the second chapter of Wattpad story, which I will publish in a moment." Hash that chapter right and the coins are yours. Seven years later, nobody has. Want to try?

What is the Real Big Block?

Stage Two of block 77

Quizchain2 block 77 came in two stages. Stage One asked you to decode Hal Finney's "Bitcoin and me" as a puzzle by Satoshi. This is Stage Two. The post calls it the "Second stage of last block". Its r/bitcoinpuzzles announcement two days later calls it Quizchain Real Big Block, with [Very Hard] in front. The author wasn't kidding.

The question is a whole chapter

No riddle, no TOMI field, no format line. The answer is the chapter itself, "Second" on Wattpad, as the author left it. The post links it a bit later: wattpad.com/720888559-second. The Wayback Machine has no copy of that page.

And "final version" matters. Wattpad shows you today's chapter, not the one from the last week of July 2019. In 2026 the old thread came back to life with people asking each other for a copy from that week. Nobody had one, at least not in public.

The lucky address

The first funding went to 1EFojcAo2vbhRGCGCa7q8Wwvzss28mhQYC, and the post spends three paragraphs on why that address is lucky. A 7 near the middle. Fibonacci numbers. Ao at digits six and seven, almost Aoi. Then a self-diagnosis: "Or maybe just another severe case of delirious Apophenia." Honestly, the best line of the whole chain.

How the line breaks changed

Two line breaks, then one, then two

The author's discussion thread opens with a warning. Wattpad got extra line breaks between paragraphs, and that "is needed to solve the block". A player points out the obvious problem: \n or \r\n? It depends on who copied what.

The author's answer, on July 28: the chapter shows two breaks, but the solution has only one. One 13 and one 10 between paragraphs, checked "with the tool at asciivalue.com".

Two days later that's gone. At 23:40 UTC on July 30 the coins leave the lucky address. A player congratulates the winner. There was none. "I took the funds back for a moment", says the author. Nine minutes later 777 mBTC land on 14zMkTgaVXJcxdh4JdWi29MLRR44iUSG9W, and the post gets an update. One twist is gone. "It is also hashed with two line breaks between paragraphs now."

Hit enter twice

The last word on it is from August 1. A player asks whether two line breaks means one empty line or two. "I mean the second one. Hit enter twice. This displays in Ascii as 13 10 13 10." So \r\n\r\n between paragraphs. Simple, as long as you have the right paragraphs.

Stage One shows the format

Note 6 in the thread says it plainly. Whoever figures out the format of Stage One gets "a big hint" for this one. Grycoin block 2 then showed that format on a small example: keep the whole text and flip the case of the letters that carry Satoshi's "signs". The author posted that block "to give a simple example for the format used in both phases of block 77". Stage One went seven minutes after Grycoin block 2. Stage Two didn't move.

The expiry plan that never ran

The post has two expiry conditions. If either comes first, the prize goes to "a climate emergency related charity" and the solution gets published. One: the 200 day moving average hits $100 per mBTC. Two: "Tanabata 2022 comes." The announcement adds the date, July 7, 2022.

Tanabata 2022 came and went. The coins didn't move, and the solution never showed up. In July 2019 the author put the odds of a solve below "that of humanity passing the reverse Turing test". So far, fair estimate.

What the record carries

export const realBigBlockChapter = puzzle({
  id: "real-big-block",
  chain: "bitcoin",
  address: "14zMkTgaVXJcxdh4JdWi29MLRR44iUSG9W",
  sourceUrl: THREAD,
  startedAt: "2019-07-22 23:10:09",
  prize: 0.777,
  hints: [official("Question: Final version of the second chapter of Wattpad story, …", THREAD), …],
  transactions: [funding("a1916e7e…", "2019-07-30 23:49:19", 0.777)],
});

Two addresses, one prize

The record's address is the one holding the coins today, and its transactions are that address's history. One funding, July 30, 2019. The lucky address keeps its own two. 499bcd42… paid it 777 mBTC on July 22. Eight days later 20c7a3e1… took 0.776903 BTC back to the author, and the rest went to the fee. Both are in the post and in the archive, just not in the list. startedAt still says July 22, 23:10:09 UTC. That's when the block went live, so the date stays even though the address came later.

Hints in the author's words

The record keeps 14 hints, all from the author. The question, the link, the line break notes in the order they came, the Grycoin example and the expiry plan. The July 28 note about a single break is in there too, although the refund made it stale. A hint records what the author said, not whether it still holds.

No key, no pubkey

14zMk… never spent, so there's no public key on chain, and nobody published a solution. verify has nothing to check, and status stays unsolved.

Why not quizchain2/77?

That id is Stage One, a different address with a different prize, claimed in August 2019. One record holds one address, and Quizchain2 counts its blocks with plain numbers. So Stage Two gets a collection of its own, named the way the author named it on r/bitcoinpuzzles. The author record is the same one Quizchain, Quizchain2 and the Grycoin chain point at.

All three threads are archived in assets/sources/real-big-block. The r/bitcoinpuzzles post has a 2023 Wayback capture with the author's comment. The two r/Grycoin threads don't, so their transcripts come from Arctic Shift, checked against pullpush.

The Real Big Block record

puzzle({
  chain: "bitcoin",
  address: "14zMkTgaVXJc…44iUSG9W",
})