The amount of insanity surfacing these couple of weeks is genuinely insane. People coming out of nowhere, claiming they found the magical way to transfer funds with absolutely zero proof and charging bands for it, the other one is apparently Gauss 2.0 and found a way to crack sha256, and others think they can outsmart a damn random distribution and find a pattern in a double hashed address...

I'm not a mathematician or anything, far from it, I'm just in my 3rd year of cybersecurity engineering. With that said, I studied hashing functions and cryptography for years, and if any of you has magically found a method to reverse sha256 or ecdsa there will be bigger things at stake than a bitcoin puzzle. That's "if", because as far as I can see all of them are spewing actual bullcrap in a last act of desperation. Trying to make sense of randomness is a shot in the dark black hole that won't yield anything but wasted time, energy, sanity, and hope for those who think it's feasible.

I'm not saying randomness is uncrackable, nothing a computer does is truly random. But unless you have an idea of the procedure used to generate the wallets or ran a side-channel attack on the author's machine, there's practically no way to predict it. The reality is painful, and so far the only way to actually crack the puzzle is to simply bruteforce it, and the only breakthroughs that could be made are in optimizing the software used to sweep through all possible keys.

I'm not attacking anyone in particular, but if you genuinely think that this could be magically solved through PROBABILITY and MATHEMATICS where the only mathematics you've used are calculating the average of the keys with wallets that "look like" the target wallet, you need to reconsider what you're doing and genuinely understand the cryptography behind bitcoin, or in general.