I tried to read as much as I can from this thread. I understood how each subsequent key has a bigger interval than the one before it, but I don't understand how the highest keys were also spent?
If this was the hex for the 57th key :
0x00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001eb25c90795d61c
which I assume is a random between (57bits)1FFFFFFFFFFFFFF and 100000000000000.
How were the highest outputs spent? Wouldn't they be extremely hard to find because of the massive 256-bit max range? I don't get it..
The creator still knows the private keys. Theres a post around here with him explaining what he did.
He realized that the 161 to 256 bit puzzles are pointless since they will never be more difficult than 160 bits as there are only 2^160 possible addresses. So he moved the funds from those puzzles into the lower puzzles.