Quote from: iceland2k14 on Today at 07:08:33 AM

Quote from: FKamil5711 on Today at 06:08:57 AM

By analyzing previously found private keys for earlier wallets, I noticed a pattern in the number of leading zeros. Based on this, I estimated that the private key for Wallet #145 might have 30–32 leading zeros.

A near miss occurs when part of the public key derived from a guessed private key matches part of the target public key. The more bytes that match, the closer the guessed private key is likely to be to the target key on the elliptic curve.

Unfortunately both of your assumptions you need to revise.
1. If looking for Puzzle 145 then it is certain to be contained in the bit range given by pow(2, 144) to pow(2, 145) - 1. Which means in the the Hex range of 0000000000000000000000000001000000000000000000000000000000000000 to 0000000000000000000000000001ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff

2. On Elliptic curve math, the distance is not measured like ordinary math. You can't say by looking even the public Key with the actual distance of 1. See there is no matching pattern between the bytes of these two.

Private_Key Public_Key
1 0279be667ef9dcbbac55a06295ce870b07029bfcdb2dce28d959f2815b16f81798
2 02c6047f9441ed7d6d3045406e95c07cd85c778e4b8cef3ca7abac09b95c709ee5

Ah,at least now I can see why my efforts were doomed from the start, it is now glaringly obvious.