seed-phrase.com

July 12, 2024, 20:06 UTC. Half a million sats, 0.005 BTC, land on bc1q7x3p…zx5227. An hour later a GitHub repository called metaneer/seed-phrase shows up, and soon after a page at seed-phrase.com. The pitch fits in one line: "Solve puzzles to uncover a secret recovery phrase that unlocks a Bitcoin wallet." First one to decode it takes the coins.

Clues every few days, until there weren't

The page is a log. Every clue gets a date heading, and after the launch each one got its own commit in the repository, so the history is right there. The record keeps 14 hints, the rules and the warnings included.

They came fast in July. A poem, a picture, a riddle about October, an emoji. August slowed down. On August 14 came an encrypted message and a second deposit of 0.005 BTC, so the prize doubled to 0.01. The last commit, the next day, just updates the balance.

Then nothing. Two years now. Did the author give up, or is everything already on the page?

What the page hands you

The first real clue is a stack of tools. A PDF of the BIP39 English wordlist, "These words will be useful:", and under it a YouTube video called BIP-39 English Wordlist. The whole list again, all 2048 words.

Under the video sits a box that changes colour. The page's script reads the video's time and playback speed and runs them through polynomials for hue, saturation and lightness. The playback speed picks which set of coefficients runs. Change the speed, change the colours. Nobody puts that on a page by accident.

The rest, in order:

• A poem about truths sleeping beneath the surface. "What word embodies this quest?"
• A link to a secret that "will only open one time ever". One click, one reader. The record keeps the sentence, not the secret.
• A pop art crowd in shock under a big pink JAZZ. Alt text "You gotta see it to believe it", title "Don't be shocked, it's a fake."
• The harvest month that also saw "a transformative paper announcing a peer-to-peer electronic cash system". The whitepaper went out on October 31, 2008.
• "web favorite icon". Two minutes earlier the same day, the site got its favicon: a big SP with coloured rays shooting from one point.
• 🤢. That's the whole clue.
• A formula: the sum of the word indexes is 29,045, each between 1 and 2,048.
• m/84'/0'/0'/0/0, the first native SegWit address. At least that one is plain.
• A magician pulling back a black cloth, titled "Illusions Michael". Yes, that's GOB from Arrested Development.

The sum does some work

Twelve words can't reach 29,045. Even twelve copies of the last word, zoo, add up to 24,576. So the phrase is at least 15 words long, and the formula never says n. Neat trick for one picture.

The locked message

The August 14 clue is ciphertext, an IV, a salt that reads salt and a password: "answer to 2024-07-19 clue (lc)". Lowercase, that is. The page ships its own tool to open it. The script hashes the password and the salt with SHA-256, a thousand rounds, and uses the result as an AES-GCM key. So the riddle about October is a key to something else. How many clues on this page play double roles?

And the policies at the bottom say it outright: "There will be red herrings."

What the seed-phrase record carries

export const seedPhrasePuzzle = puzzle({
  id: "seed-phrase",
  chain: "bitcoin",
  address: "bc1q7x3p3rkmkxgf20n3apkccqcmn5mdtsf8zx5227",
  sourceUrl: SITE,
  startedAt: "2024-07-12 20:06:29",
  key: derivation("m/84'/0'/0'/0/0"),
  techniques: [technique("hidden-seed-words", SITE), technique("aes", SITE)],
  prize: 0.01,
  hints: [/* the rules, the red herrings and every dated clue */],
  transactions: [funding(/* 0.005 BTC */), increase(/* 0.005 BTC more */)],
  assets: assets({ hints: [/* the wordlist, three pictures, the favicon */], digests: [/* … */] }),
});

Every clue has a receipt

A website can change overnight. So each dated hint carries the commit that put it on the page as its confirmation. Same words, same day, with a SHA you can check.

Pictures as hints

Five files back the clues, so the record ships them: the wordlist PDF, the JAZZ crowd, the favicon, the formula and the magician. Each is pinned by SHA-256 and size, next to its URL on the site and a Wayback capture that serves the same bytes. The picture clues keep their alt and title text as the hint, because that's the only text they have.

No phrase, just the path

The derivation path is the one thing the author spelled out, so key holds the path and no words. The 0.01 BTC sits there unspent. Whoever builds the phrase first gets to fill in the rest.

The seed-phrase.com record

puzzle({
  chain: "bitcoin",
  address: "bc1q7x3p3rkm…f8zx5227",
  key: derivation("m/84'/0'/0'/0/0"),
})