Collections

Brainwallet puzzle, 0.04 BTC

Twelve trivia riddles typed into brainwallet.io as a passphrase and a salt. The 2017 rules and every published answer and how the record rebuilds the key

Autumn 2017. r/bitcoinpuzzles is a ghost town. The announcement literally opens with "All (5 of you)". Then Kierkegaard_Soren decides to wake the place up with real money and twelve riddles that go absolutely everywhere. Patents, chess, freeways, WikiLeaks, ham. This one is a gem.

The plan was 0.05 BTC, about $300. Bitcoin went up in the meantime, so on November 4 the post went out with 0.04 BTC. Six hours later the wallet was empty.

IDtrivia-brainwallet30 / 341 puzzle · 2017-11-04
Collection

Brainwallet puzzle, 0.04 BTC

bitcoin

Twelve riddles from patents to chess to a ham deal, typed into brainwallet.io as a passphrase and a salt. Swept six hours after the post.

Prize recorded
0.04 BTC
Still unsolved
none
closed 1 / 1

Census

solved
1100%
public keys
1100%
private keys
1100%

Access

LoadgetCollection("trivia-brainwallet")
Showtrivia-brainwallet in the playground

How the trivia brainwallet works

Ten answers in, two answers of salt

Every riddle gives one word or one number. Lowercase, no punctuation. Answers 1 to 10 go into brainwallet.io in order, one space between them. Answers 11 and 12 go into the salt field of the "generic" tab. Hit generate. Same address as in the post? You win.

Different address? Tough luck. The post says to check your spaces first, then your answers. That's the only feedback you get. Twelve answers, one wrong letter anywhere, and you're staring at a random address with no idea which riddle broke it. Brutal and kind of beautiful.

Twelve riddles, twelve rabbit holes

The post promised trivia "from different corners of knowledge". It wasn't exaggerating. A few favorites:

  • A row of hex bytes. Decode it and you get coordinates plus "what are they selling (hoosier street)". Furniture, it turns out.
  • sopranos.reframed.snubbed. Three random words? No, a what3words address. In Mozambique.
  • Half a Beyoncé album plus half a Law and Order actor. Lemonade and Ice-T, so an Arnold Palmer. His last US Open round fell on June 17, 1994, the day of the O.J. Simpson car chase. Add up the freeways from the chase: 611. Who even thinks of that?
  • A patent from exactly 138 years before launch day. The refrigerator, 221222. Minus the area code of Dayton, Ohio, where the cash register got its patent the same day.
  • Seven people in a line, a logic puzzle, then every letter of their names as numbers. The answer is 82 digits long. Good luck typing that without a typo.
  • A chess game from 1834 and "name the non-Frenchman". McDonnell.

The best one is clue 6. "Multiply that result by the year I was born." Who's "I"? The handle is Kierkegaard_Soren, and Søren Kierkegaard was born in 1813. Nobody ever needed the real birthday of the person behind the account. Cheeky.

What brainwallet.io does with it

Not one SHA-256 like the old brainwallets. The generic tab runs scrypt over the passphrase and the salt, N = 2^18, r = 8, p = 1, 32 bytes out. That output becomes 64 hex characters, and SHA-256 of those characters is the private key. Uncompressed P2PKH on top.

The site is dead, the code isn't. The Wayback Machine has brainwallet.io from October 11, 2017, 24 days before launch. That file is byte for byte the one in routman/brainwallet.io at commit 7c9ca3f. And the hex step matters a lot. Hash the raw scrypt bytes instead, or take the compressed address, and you land somewhere else. Only the page's own reading hits the prize.

Who solved the brainwallet puzzle

Quantris, with a little help from brute force

The claim landed in block 493,125 at 02:05:31 UTC on November 5. Eleven seconds after that block's timestamp Quantris wrote "Claimed it :)" in the thread. Half the prize went to charity. The spend pays 0.019935 BTC to 1HB5XMLmzFVj8ALj6mfBsbifRoD4miY36v, which Quantris named as WikiLeaks' donation address. So clue 9 was about WikiLeaks, and WikiLeaks got paid. Nice loop.

The author asked right away how they got number 12. And the answer is great. They didn't. Quantris "totally cheesed" it, trying even numbers in the salt until the address matched. Eleven answers right and the last one a small number? That's a few clicks. The real clue was a Twitter account, 2 hams for $20. Quantris had seen it years before and still didn't connect it. Happens to the best of us.

Forty-eight minutes after the claim came the full walkthrough. Every answer, in spoiler tags, most with the steps. The author thanked them for it. That comment is where every answer on the record comes from.

Solved, not claimed

A claim plus a published solution is solved in this dataset. One funding in, one spend out, 5h 59m from the post to the claim.

Where the key on the record comes from

Nobody ever printed it

Not the post, not the comments. No private key, no WIF. So the record rebuilds it. The winner's answers, lowercased and joined exactly the way the post says, go once through the recipe above. First try, straight onto 1E3NARnUX25UgMvZd5EZTutD9yVHTVGDNC. The public key it derives is the same one the claim transaction exposed in its input. Can't ask for a better check than that.

Still, it's rebuilt, not quoted. That's what .derived() is for, so puzzles show never calls the key published.

tssrc/collections/trivia-brainwallet.ts
export const triviaBrainwalletRiddles = bitcoinPuzzle({
  id: "trivia-brainwallet",
  address: p2pkh("1E3NARnUX25UgMvZd5EZTutD9yVHTVGDNC", "8f0c21f95e718fbea2a5dfd417fa1338633d03ac"),
  sourceUrl: THREAD,
  startedAt: "2017-11-04 20:05:55",
  preGenesis: true,
  status: Status.Solved,
  pubkey: uncompressed("04e5a18d9449ea5ee3be007dfa5fc7d8...7b92bdf16fc"),
  key: hex("eccf44b2a700e0149d67331f803ca4f68ba5793df7a4fbb75c3f7d0752faffd9")
    .wif("5KcaZnDWjq8r8SjBPPefvGdYicv4aiQ1E7FR4SMa8CVZn6SSfEi")
    .passphrase("furniture mozambique 611 electromagnetic eve 119658 220285 ...")
    .salt("mcdonnell 20")
    .derived(),
  prize: 0.04,
});

verify() checks the hex against the address. It can't rerun scrypt, so the passphrase and the salt are there for you. Want to try it yourself? Go ahead.

The money came first, by 94 seconds

The 0.04 BTC confirmed at 20:04:21 UTC. The post went up at 20:05:55. That's what preGenesis: true says: the address is older than the thread. startedAt is the thread's time, because that's when anyone could start.

The thread lives in the repo too

Clues in a post, answers in a Reddit comment. Reddit forgets stuff. So the post, both edits and all 66 comments the 2023 capture still shows are kept as an archived reading copy, checked against that capture. The October announcement sits right next to it.

The trivia brainwallet record

IDtrivia-brainwallet2017-11-04 → 2017-11-05
Puzzle / trivia-brainwallet

bitcoinp2pkh solvedpre-genesis

Record 

bitcoinPuzzle({
  address: p2pkh("1E3NARnUX25U…VHTVGDNC", "8f0c21f95e71…633d03ac"),
  status: Status.Solved,
  key: hex("eccf44b2a700…52faffd9").wif("5KcaZnDWjq8r…Zn6SSfEi").passphrase("furniture mo…12611251").salt("mcdonnell 20").derived(),
})
Prize
0.04 BTC
Key material
hex, derived from the recipe
Verification
verified
Solved
2017-11-05 · 5h 59m
tx 2
Trail
Explorerblockstream.info
Sourcereddit.com/r/bitcoinpuzzles/comments/7asy51/brainwallet_puzzle_004_btc_reward
SolverQuantris and what else they solved
Trytrivia-brainwallet in the playground
Address
1E3NARnUX25UgMvZd5EZTutD9yVHTVGDNC

hash160 8f0c21f95e718fbea2a5dfd417fa1338633d03ac

Balance
asking the explorer

Key

public key · uncompressed
04e5a18d9449ea5ee3be007dfa5fc7d8702103e814f35e661c1d06bcd644ec36a6b84869b75c0690abc9f6379d8991910d53462350b37271818c17c7b92bdf16fc
private key (hex)
eccf44b2a700e0149d67331f803ca4f68ba5793df7a4fbb75c3f7d0752faffd9
WIF
5KcaZnDWjq8r8SjBPPefvGdYicv4aiQ1E7FR4SMa8CVZn6SSfEi
passphrase
furniture mozambique 611 electromagnetic eve 119658 220285 5203242011492 wikileaks 1125241144181121721192091451125241144518120209321191141192011992511121914112611251
salt
mcdonnell 20

Transactions

  1. funding2017-11-040.04 BTC75c4a9ed1b…f05755
  2. claim2017-11-050.03987 BTCc8d236ad1f…fe3d5d

Hints

  1. undated

    officialThe below puzzles will yield a single American English word or a single number as their solution. Take the answer to each puzzle (besides the last two) and put them IN ORDER into brainwallet.io with a single space between each answer (and no space at the end of the last clue).

    Sourcereddit.com/r/bitcoinpuzzles/comments/7asy51/brainwallet_puzzle_004_btc_rewardConfirmweb.archive.org

  2. undated

    officialBrainWallet is case sensitive. So only lowercase letters will be used. There will be no uppercase letters used. No punctuation is used, even in numbers. No answers will have spaces within that answer.

    Sourcereddit.com/r/bitcoinpuzzles/comments/7asy51/brainwallet_puzzle_004_btc_rewardConfirmweb.archive.org

  3. undated

    officialTake the final two answers for the last 2 puzzles (puzzles 11 and 12) and use them as “salt” in the “generic” tab of brainwallet. Make sure that those final two answers are separated by one space and that there is no space after the second answer. Hit “generate”.

    Sourcereddit.com/r/bitcoinpuzzles/comments/7asy51/brainwallet_puzzle_004_btc_rewardConfirmweb.archive.org

  4. undated

    official1) 33 37 2e 37 34 39 33 35 34 20 2d 31 32 32 2e 33 38 39 39 35 36 20 77 68 61 74 20 61 72 65 20 74 68 65 79 20 73 65 6c 6c 69 6e 67 20 28 68 6f 6f 73 69 65 72 20 73 74 72 65 65 74 29

    Sourcereddit.com/r/bitcoinpuzzles/comments/7asy51/brainwallet_puzzle_004_btc_rewardConfirmweb.archive.org

    Published answer

    numbers are hex for ASCII, giving you lat/long coordinates for a store that sells: furniture

    2017-11-05reddit.com/r/bitcoinpuzzles/comments/7asy51/brainwallet_puzzle_004_btc_reward/dpd2gj4

  5. undated

    official2) sopranos.reframed.snubbed - what country? Find the right tool (could be helpful to consider what is being input and what the desired output is).

    Sourcereddit.com/r/bitcoinpuzzles/comments/7asy51/brainwallet_puzzle_004_btc_rewardConfirmweb.archive.org

    Published answer

    it's a what3words address for a location in: Mozambique

    2017-11-05reddit.com/r/bitcoinpuzzles/comments/7asy51/brainwallet_puzzle_004_btc_reward/dpd2gj4

  6. undated

    official3) 1/2 Beyonce's [approx. 2pi - 0.28]th studio album, 1/2 law and order actor/actress, [the first night playing at USSR closed (on opposite day)] - what else happened? sum the four numerical freeways.

    Sourcereddit.com/r/bitcoinpuzzles/comments/7asy51/brainwallet_puzzle_004_btc_rewardConfirmweb.archive.org

    Published answer

    step 1: 1/2 lemonade 1/2 ice tea is an Arnold Palmer; step 2: opposites -> the last day playing at US open; step 3: Arnold Palmer's last US open round was June 17 1994, same day as the famous O.J. Simpson car chase; answer: Freeways involved in the chase were 5, 91, 110, and 405; the sum is: 611

    2017-11-05reddit.com/r/bitcoinpuzzles/comments/7asy51/brainwallet_puzzle_004_btc_reward/dpd2gj4

  7. undated

    official4) Of the four inter-galactic governors, on the order of 246, the answer to this puzzle is married to the weak one. (use the adjective form)

    Sourcereddit.com/r/bitcoinpuzzles/comments/7asy51/brainwallet_puzzle_004_btc_rewardConfirmweb.archive.org

    Published answer

    this refers to fundamental forces, and at 246 GeV the weak and electromagnetic forces merge into electroweak. The answer is: electromagnetic

    2017-11-05reddit.com/r/bitcoinpuzzles/comments/7asy51/brainwallet_puzzle_004_btc_reward/dpd2gj4

  8. undated

    official5) The same both forwards and backwards, this character is the O.G. when it comes to behaving badly.

    Sourcereddit.com/r/bitcoinpuzzles/comments/7asy51/brainwallet_puzzle_004_btc_rewardConfirmweb.archive.org

    Published answer

    The clue indicates a palindromic name; the original sinner: Eve

    2017-11-05reddit.com/r/bitcoinpuzzles/comments/7asy51/brainwallet_puzzle_004_btc_reward/dpd2gj4

  9. undated

    official6) Most elderly player to hit a ball out of the park with the bases loaded (MLB) --> what is their home country? --> Take total square miles of said country (per Wikipedia) --> identify the prime factorization of that number --> sum those factors --> multiply that result by the year I was born to get your final answer.

    Sourcereddit.com/r/bitcoinpuzzles/comments/7asy51/brainwallet_puzzle_004_btc_rewardConfirmweb.archive.org

    Published answer

    step 1: Julio Franco -> Dominican Republic -> 18,655 sq. mi -> 5, 7, 13, 41; step 2: Kierkegaard (see OP's username) was born in 1813; answer: (5 + 7 + 13 + 41) * 1813 = 119658

    2017-11-05reddit.com/r/bitcoinpuzzles/comments/7asy51/brainwallet_puzzle_004_btc_reward/dpd2gj4

  10. undated

    official7) Upon this day (of the launch of the puzzle) after subtracting 138 from the largest unit of time generally used, a really cool thing happened. Take the identifying, official number from that event, and subtract from it the telephone area code of the place where the other thing ($) that happened that day happened.

    Sourcereddit.com/r/bitcoinpuzzles/comments/7asy51/brainwallet_puzzle_004_btc_rewardConfirmweb.archive.org

    Published answer

    step 1: 138 years ago today, patent US221222 is issued to Elkins for something cool: a fridge; step 2: Same day, patent on cash register issued to Ritty from Drayton, Ohio: area code 937; answer: 221222 - 937 = 220285

    2017-11-05reddit.com/r/bitcoinpuzzles/comments/7asy51/brainwallet_puzzle_004_btc_reward/dpd2gj4

  11. undated

    official8) Relativity. Princeton. He had a teacher. Teacher died in 1909. Teacher had a thing named after him. Go to the very bottom of the Wikipedia page for that particular thing. Not the very bottom but close to it. There is a number down there. 8 digits, including one dash. Remove the smallest digit. Remove the dash. 74616b65796f75726173736f6e6f766572746f77696b6964617461. The answer is the coordinate data from the resulting entry without any punctuation (use only the digits. In order.)

    Sourcereddit.com/r/bitcoinpuzzles/comments/7asy51/brainwallet_puzzle_004_btc_rewardConfirmweb.archive.org

    Published answer

    step 1: Talking about Einstein. Teacher that died in 1909 is Minkowski; step 2: At bottom of wikipedia for Minkowski space, we see GND: 4293944-6; follow the instructions to get 4939446; step 3: decode the hex-ASCII, which sends you to wikidata; answer: look up 4939446 in wikidata; take only digits from the attached coordinates to get: 5203242011492

    2017-11-05reddit.com/r/bitcoinpuzzles/comments/7asy51/brainwallet_puzzle_004_btc_reward/dpd2gj4

  12. undated

    official9) The place that darkness fears the most, Causing orgs to hold their secrets close, Supported by crypto, Founder must tiptoe, As he collects more things to post.

    Sourcereddit.com/r/bitcoinpuzzles/comments/7asy51/brainwallet_puzzle_004_btc_rewardConfirmweb.archive.org

    Published answer

    a poem about: Wikileaks

    2017-11-05reddit.com/r/bitcoinpuzzles/comments/7asy51/brainwallet_puzzle_004_btc_reward/dpd2gj4

  13. undated

    official10) Seven individuals, Alaina, Azalea, Alexandra, Augustine, Atticus, Anastasiya, and Alexander, all stand in a straight line, all facing the same direction. Atticus and Azalea have exactly two people between them. Azalea and Alaina are not at the front of the line. Atticus is further ahead in the line than Anastasiya. Alexander has one person in between he and Anastasiya. Augustine is one spot away from either the front or the back of the line. Azalea is directly next to Alaina. Atticus is directly in the middle of the line. Identify the order of the individuals from the front of the line to the back, then take the names of the people in order and convert every letter to their corresponding numerical value in the alphabet (A=1, B=2…Z=26). The answer to this puzzle is all of the numerical values without any spaces between them in the order of their places in line. (AKA, the answer will be a loooonng continuous string of numbers.)

    Sourcereddit.com/r/bitcoinpuzzles/comments/7asy51/brainwallet_puzzle_004_btc_rewardConfirmweb.archive.org

    Published answer

    step 1: logic out that the order of people has to be Alexandra, Augustine, Alexander, Atticus, Anastasiya, Alaina, Azalea; answer: follow instructions to get: 1125241144181121721192091451125241144518120209321191141192011992511121914112611251

    2017-11-05reddit.com/r/bitcoinpuzzles/comments/7asy51/brainwallet_puzzle_004_btc_reward/dpd2gj4

  14. undated

    official11) 1834: a1 a2 a3 b1 b3 b7 c2 c3 d6 f8 h6 --> Name the non-Frenchman.

    Sourcereddit.com/r/bitcoinpuzzles/comments/7asy51/brainwallet_puzzle_004_btc_rewardConfirmweb.archive.org

    Published answer

    the coordinates are where pieces were located at the end of a famous chess match in 1834, between the frenchman De la Bourdonnais and the non-frenchman: McDonnell

    2017-11-05reddit.com/r/bitcoinpuzzles/comments/7asy51/brainwallet_puzzle_004_btc_reward/dpd2gj4

  15. undated

    official12) Purchase 2 dripping, succulent, sopping pieces of land meat for this number of U.S. dollars.

    Sourcereddit.com/r/bitcoinpuzzles/comments/7asy51/brainwallet_puzzle_004_btc_rewardConfirmweb.archive.org

    Published answer

    A reference to @buy_2_hams, where the price is: 20

    2017-11-05reddit.com/r/bitcoinpuzzles/comments/7asy51/brainwallet_puzzle_004_btc_reward/dpd2gj4

  16. 2017-11-05

    officialThere is a twitter account called 2 hams for $20. Check it out.

    Sourcereddit.com/r/bitcoinpuzzles/comments/7asy51/brainwallet_puzzle_004_btc_reward/dpd0vk2

local record / balance from the explorer

ID@agntn/puzzlesv0.25.0MIT license

Public data about public puzzles. Balances come from the chains' explorers through the worker, cached for five minutes. Every key here was public before it landed in a record.