Satoshi birthday 7 million quiz

April 5, 2019. Satoshi's registered birthday. A Reddit account called AoiNakamoto funded a fresh wallet with 7,000,000 satoshis, about $350 back then, posted seven quiz questions to r/Bitcoin and told everyone to race for it. The wallet lasted five hours.

How the Satoshi birthday quiz works

Seven questions, one hash

The rules are two sentences: "The SHA 256 hash of all correct answers combined is the wallet seed. Insert one space between answers."

The questions are Bitcoin trivia with teeth. Which burn address holds more, 1AndrewYangForPresident2o2ozm6Pzd or 1TRUMPforPresident2o2oxxxxxAvY6s? What did r/Bitcoin look like on December 7, 2010? Which coprocessor did Hal Finney's RPOW run on?

What you type is the answer sentence, not the letter in front of it. Someone asked, so the author spelled it out: copy the option "as is, with spaces and period at the end", drop the leading d), one space between sentences, one hash from all seven.

Why brute force was supposed to lose

Four options times seven questions is 16,384 combinations. The author says so in the post, which is a bold thing to publish next to your own money. The bet was that nobody has a script ready on a Friday, so the race goes to whoever just knows the answers.

It worked. The thread is full of people with six answers right, stuck on question two, an Executive Order 6102 trap where the wrong option is correct except for its last three words. "before May 1st" should have been "before or on May 1st". That's the whole trick.

The hash is entropy, not a private key

This is where most of the competitors burned their afternoon. The hash is not a private key and not a passphrase. It goes into iancoleman.io/bip39 as hex entropy, comes back as a 24-word phrase, and the money sits at the first address of that wallet, m/44'/0'/0'/0/0. One guy burned hours pushing the hash straight into Electrum as a key and got nowhere with it.

The author confirmed both parts in the thread. Coleman's tool, and "Legacy Bitcoin address starting with 1."

What the birthday quiz record carries

The answer key rides on the hint

export const satoshiBirthdayQuizPuzzle = bitcoinPuzzle({
  id: "satoshi-birthday-quiz",
  address: p2pkh("1GNrvamE9WP4DL6hTicWy1aoqCUwFM2Jbz", "a8ac4bd83f5946f7e7b2452c1a9f28eba2bd13d2"),
  sourceUrl: THREAD,
  startedAt: "2019-04-05 09:45:02",
  status: Status.Solved,
  pubkey: compressed("02a3fdb91b1ad15a52e41be79bab912ac993d573ac015a7d27fc01ba61a9ff53fd"),
  key: seed("another blush custom lucky ... engine solve", "m/44'/0'/0'/0/0").entropy(
    "098310da4251c5b19359f3f6cca90bf1bd6f882e066512c4619cae56aef9529e",
    source(THREAD, "SHA-256 of the seven answer sentences, joined by single spaces"),
  ),
  prize: 0.07,
  hints: [
    official(
      "To find the seed, answer the following 7 quiz questions ...",
      THREAD,
      confirmation(CAPTURE),
      {
        answer: answer("1 c) 2 a) 3 d) 4 a) 5 b) 6 d) and 7 a)", THREAD),
      },
    ),
  ],
});

Every hint here is the author talking: the rules, the formatting example, the address type, the credit to Ian Coleman. The answer key hangs off the first hint as its answer, because that's where it was published, in a comment written after the money was gone, and that hint's confirmation points at the Wayback capture. A hint says what was said and who said it. It never says whether it was right.

Why the key carries both halves

entropy is the SHA-256 of the answer sentences. seed is the phrase that hex turns into, plus the path it's read at. Keep both and the record shows its derivation instead of just claiming a result, and verify() reruns the second half on every check.

Where the address comes from

The thread never printed it

Worth saying out loud, because everything else in this dataset works the other way around. The post has no address and no txid. Someone asked for a signed message to prove the money was real, and got told that trusting a stranger is part of the fun.

What the author did publish, once the wallet was empty, is the answer key and the exact recipe: hash the seven sentences, paste the hex into Coleman's tool, take the first address. Run it and you land on 1GNrvamE9WP4DL6hTicWy1aoqCUwFM2Jbz. The chain does the rest without any help from us: 7,000,000 sats in at 09:45:02 UTC on April 5, 2019, everything out at 14:52:36 that afternoon. Right amount, right day, one funding and one spend. Either it's the quiz wallet or it's a hell of a coincidence.

The answer key only ever lived in a Reddit comment, and Reddit rots, so the post and all 44 comments live in the repo as an archived reading copy with a screenshot and the 2023 Wayback capture it was checked against. Nine of those comments already show [deleted] as their author, and three lost the text as well.

Five hours, not ten minutes

The author hoped the wallet would fall faster than a block gets mined. It took 5h 7m, with live commentary the whole way: "Still not swept after 50 minutes. Definitely taking longer than average block."

The winner never posted. The sweep moved 0.0696808 BTC to a P2SH address and said nothing at all.

Is the birthday quiz solved?

Yes, and verify() says verified instead of taking the status on trust. The phrase and the path derive the address on the record, and the public key the sweep exposed matches its hash160. solveTime is 18,454 seconds, which is just the gap between the two transactions.

A singleton id, no name segment

satoshi-birthday-quiz is the whole identifier, like gsmg, bitaps, mineshop and movie-enigma. One puzzle, one key, no slash.

The birthday quiz record

bitcoinPuzzle({
  address: p2pkh("1GNrvamE9WP4…UwFM2Jbz", "a8ac4bd83f59…a2bd13d2"),
  status: Status.Solved,
  key: seed("another blus…ne solve", "m/44'/0'/0'/0/0").entropy("098310da4251…aef9529e", source("https://www.…on_quiz/")).derived(),
})