BlockCrushr Labs

Who this is

A blockchain development lab, and the only team on this list. Its Medium publication carries "Solving Decred's Autonomy puzzle", written by Scott Burke in May 2017, in the first person plural. The record credits the lab, because that's whose name is on it.

Autonomy was the third puzzle of the Decred Puzzle Team, made by coin_artist with Zden and an illustrator. An 82 MB render of a gate full of gears, a GIF on a little TV, and a text box that says "I know it".

How it went

The TV blinks in binary: CORE TOO PAINED. Anagram: OPERATION CODES. Type in Decred's own opcodes and gears appear. Then everybody got stuck for a long time, until it turned out you measure each gear's cam shaft in pixels, divide by ten, and turn the wheels that many steps. That gives four words, those are an anagram of NEW TERRITORY OF FREEDOM, a line from Satoshi. A few stages later comes a Gandhi quote, and it only works with a space before the final full stop, so that the text fills all 116 characters. Then the quote is a Vigenère key for 259 characters of gibberish, and out comes a 33 word seed. Galveston has to be capitalized.

"My heart started racing", the write-up says at that point. Fair enough. This is the kind of puzzle where every step is a small joke on you.

What the record says and what it doesn't

One fact, the walk-through, and two links, the article and the publication. The record has no solve date and no prize, because the post ends at "It worked!" and gives neither. The walk-through also thanks other players by name for pieces of the path, which is honest. A team solve with outside help is still a team solve.

The record

solver: party("BlockCrushr Labs", {
  key: "blockcrushr-labs",
  kind: PartyKind.Organization,
  about: "Blockchain development lab whose Medium publication carries the Autonomy walk-through.",
  profiles: [
    profile("solution", "https://medium.com/blockcrushr-labs/solving-decreds-autonomy-puzzle-aedac18f18f3"),
    profile("medium", "https://medium.com/blockcrushr-labs"),
  ],
  facts: [
    fact("Scott Burke wrote the walk-through for the publication: …", "https://medium.com/blockcrushr-labs/solving-decreds-autonomy-puzzle-aedac18f18f3", { date: "2017-05-08" }),
  ],
}),