Quote from: xhomerx10 on September 27, 2016, 11:29:49 AM

That is very disappointing.
If we look at it from another perspective, it's actually good news because if we can't solve this puzzle even with the clues, imagine how safe our Bitcoins are from brute force cracking Wink

Well... maybe they're not THAT safe (if we get clues Wink

)...

So at around 1509 hrs UTC on 28th September (around 0409 hrs on the 29th local)... my script spat out another possible hit... I was working a night shift and so I didn't actually get around to checking it until around 8 hours later.

Amongst the 3 new possible hits that had been generated, one started with "1qk...."... could this be it?? I quickly checked on blockchain.info... "Final Balance: 0.5001 BTC"... WOOOOHOOOO!!!!!!! Shocked

So I quickly imported the private key into my wallet and transferred my newfound loot into my own personal address. Grin

The private key turned out to be: 5JKPapJwgyEij3sxYRAEnixyiFgxqkVhgZXv9bWWknBexegx6tM

5 - 1_3_5
J - Steve Jobs
K - Kevlar
P - Pi
a - Atari
p - parachute
J - Jet
w - wing
g - Johannes Gutenberg
y - yoyo
E - mc^2 = E
i - iron #lowercase BLUE
j - jigsaw
3 - 1836 Morse Code Invented
s - scissors
x - x-ray #lowercase BLUE
Y - Linus Yale #UPPERCASE lightGreen
R - radar
A - Aspirin #UPPERCASE lightGreen
E - Eiffel Tower
n - Nobel
i - ice skate #lowercase BLUE
x - XX chromosome
y - XY chromosome
i - igloo #lowercase BLUE
F - film
g - Galileo
x - Xerox
q - Question
k - Nakamoto #lowercase BLUE
V - vaporiser #UPPERCASE lightGreen
h - Satoshi
g - Gramophone
Z - zipper #UPPERCASE lightGreen
X - alphabet X
v - viagra #lowercase BLUE
9 - Euro - 1996
b - Braile for B
W - WiFi #UPPERCASE lightGreen
W - Windows
k - krypton (periodic table) #lowercase BLUE
n - DNA #lowercase BLUE
B - balloon #UPPERCASE lightGreen
e - Einstein
x - 2009 MMIX #lowercase BLUE
e - Etch a Sketch
g - Gameboy
x - Xeon (periodic table) #lowercase BLUE
6 - 1962 LED invention date
t - Tesla
M - Mouse

For this second big run, I decided to make some assumptions on upper/lowercase based on tile colour... the first clue being the "i" characters. Due to the Base58 alphabet only having lowercase i, and the 2 "i" clues that I was fairly confident on (iron and igloo) both being blue tiles, I decided to try making all the blue tiles lowercase. The 2nd character is always an uppercase in a WIF address. It was light green, so I decided to set all the lightgreen tiles to uppercase. For all the other tile colours, I was including both the lower and uppercase for my best guess at what the character was which increased the keyspace quite considerably.

However, setting the blues and light greens to a single case helped cut the final keyspace I was searching down to "only" 8,589,934,592 key combinations, which at 25,000/s would take around 90ish hours (just under 4 days) to complete.

Analysis after finding the key shows that in addition to my (thankfully correct) assumptions on upper/lower case, that black tiles were all uppercase, while the red and darker green tiles were all lowercase.

In the end, the script only got through just over 1,103,000,000 keys (in just under 12 hours) before I got lucky:

Quote

Checking [8589934592] Keys...
Start: 2016-09-28 17:08:17.702438
1000000 Addresses 2016-09-28 17:08:53.797499
2000000 Addresses 2016-09-28 17:09:30.093016
3000000 Addresses 2016-09-28 17:10:06.433803
.
.
.
1103000000 Addresses 2016-09-29 04:09:38.866786
We have a possible winner!: 5JKPapJwgyEij3sxYRAEnixyiFgxqkVhgZXv9bWWknBexegx6tM
1104000000 Addresses 2016-09-29 04:10:14.934280
.
.

I sent a note to the puzzle creator to let them know... and I have created a PasteBin with my source code in case anyone wants to see my pretty ugly and untidy python code Wink