First off, thanks to CoinArtist and Rob Myers. I had lots of fun and met many new friends! I will enjoy your future work.
2. crax0r figuring out that the pacemaker was just the artefact of the 0s on each second flame length xored by the key-string 011010
...
What crax0r had wrong was that the xoring by the key-string 011010 was not restricted to length only, but it went in a kind of circle throughout all bit streams, but it could be figured out as per the observation 4 and moreover one was able to see that in that way the 0x1x1x pacemaker was preserved too.
That was actually my work, but I was working with crax0r and others. We even figured out that the 0 is probably the MSB of the reassembled data... on Jan 2! Kind of kicking myself on that one, because we knew what it meant but didn't fully explore it. Kind of lost sight of it afterwards in favor of chasing down other possibilities.
https://i.imgur.com/1aaSJyF.pngYou'll note that the keyfile message & code I posted was a distant variation of the actual solution. We tried both xor-ing the streams sequentially and reassembling all flame bits first. We were
incredibly close in some of our attempts, as were many others. I actually had code that would've brute forced the actual solution, except we had excluded the blob data track. If we had included that track the search would've found the key. Beyond that, the biggest misstep for us was putting any stock whatsoever in the rest of the clues. It turns out that virtually everything in the puzzle was a red herring. Literally every clue, except the key, was completely pointless.
- 1FLAMEN6 - means nothing
- Phoenix, dove, knight, queen - nothing
- Chess board - nothing
- Leaves - NOTHING!
- Weird flames - nothing
- Mirrored bits - nothing
- Tweets from coinartist - nothing
- Spirals - mostly nothing (small indication of order)
- Poem by coinartist - nothing
- Blue squares - nothing
- Flames on chess board - nothing
- Phoenix spikes - nothing
- Dove tail - nothing
- Weird queen bottom - nothing
- Melting queen - nothing
Overall I'm a little disappointed in the solution. It appears there was no trail of clues or anything to lead you to the answer. You simply had to guess at how to decode it. Looking at the number of combinations to find the correct solution, assuming you
knew that the puzzle was created like this: flame_split(xor(WIF+string,011010)) and making no assumptions about the path, direction, value of flames, or order of the flame bits, you get this:
- Order of bits - 4!
- Flame 1/0 value = 2*2*2*2
- Order of segments - 8!
- Direction of segments 2^8
Combinations: 3,963,617,280
And that's if you
KNOW the solution method but make no other assumptions. It's not very surprising why it took 3 years to solve. Add the part where you don't know the actual solution, all the red herring clues and thousands of possible methods to encode a private key. That turns the number of combinations well into trillions. Without legitimate clues leading to the solution it seems kind of arbitrary.
Oh well, onto the next thing. Looks like everyone is working on neon district?
