RushWallet contest

The puzzle

RushWallet was a brainwallet service. Type a passphrase, get a key. In September 2014 its author funded thirty addresses from thirty passphrases and dared people to find them. Almost all of them fell over the following years. The last solve on the record is from 2018. And the passphrases turned out to be the kind of thing a wordlist finds: long digit strings, repeated tokens.

What the records carry

A solved RushWallet puzzle carries the hex key, the uncompressed WIF and the passphrase that produced it. The data gate checks two things: the key derives the address, and the WIF decodes to the key. The passphrase is on the record as data. The library doesn't re-hash it. Passphrase to key is RushWallet's own scheme and out of scope here.

export const rushwalletPuzzle1 = puzzle({
  id: "rushwallet/1",
  chain: "bitcoin",
  address: "1NKUXbr2URfQyzREPUzoj4MR4ytF5mEm8u",
  sourceUrl: "https://web.archive.org/web/20150208172337/https://rushwallet.com/contest",
  startedAt: "2014-09-22 20:17:14",
  status: Status.Solved,
  pubkey: uncompressed("040f5492…4d52"),
  key: hex("af9a17713338d255ca023b7014c2c9dfcbef656d61a3370156bb804269b74a0d")
    .wif("5K9d6a9ivmDKRe77hnzrSrg2iGkwFuvg1cCGDGBpsgyk6is9U7g")
    .passphrase("5784623964023 578462396402"),
  solvedAt: "2018-01-10 19:55:58",
});

No prize on any of them. The contest paid its winners outside the funded addresses. A prize field here would be a guess, so the record leaves it out instead of writing 0.

Status

Twenty-nine solved and one still unsolved. Wallet 26 used to be the odd one, claimed: swept on 2014-09-25, two and a half days into the contest, and no key anywhere. The coins moved and nobody said how.

Twelve years later the passphrase turned up by accident, in research on something else entirely. And what was it? RushWallet by Kryptokit Fundraiser. The contest's own name, typed into its own brainwallet. Not exactly a wordlist challenge. It hashes to the record's public key, so wallet 26 is solved now. solvedAt is the sweep and solver stays empty, because who swept it is still anyone's guess.

Every puzzle

One page each: the record, the transactions and the live balance.