Quote from: rico666 on October 12, 2016, 05:44:52 AM

Quote from: ryanc on October 12, 2016, 03:13:49 AM

It is far more plausible that this was a "challenge" someone made, to see how long it would take to be solved

Ryan... I take that statement and put it on my stack, where it remains together with your statement, that the 1st 50bits have been searched already.
Both statements will have the same weight on my stack for the time being.

Rico

Well, this result demonstrates that only the outputs of that puzzle transaction were searched by whoever did that, which only mildly surprises me.

If someone posts in this thread a different private key that also works out to 1PVwqUXrD5phy6gWrqJUrhpsPiBkTnftGg, I'll pay them 5BTC.

The explanation is either a deliberately weak key or bad generation code, and I'm saying that deliberately weak seems more likely because I can't come up with a good explanation of how bad generation code would result in that particular key.