Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Bitcoin puzzle transaction ~32 BTC prize to who solves it
by
kTimesG
on 01/06/2025, 16:52:32 UTC
You mentioned "really depends on your background". Did you mean coding background? If so, absolutely none. I have a medical background, specifically paramedic. A dead person is also known as a "code". So the only "coding" I ever did was on dead people, and ironically, this project may be the death of me.

Oh. No worries, this puzzle's been analyzed to death by everyone, from toddlers to NSA counter-operatives hiding in Siberian igloos, ice-fishing between GitHub pushes.

Medical background can help. After all, you just made me realize that "dead code" is a redundant pleonasm [sigh]. But specifically for elliptic curves, we do have some limbs to worry about - do we do 4x64 or 5x52? Careful though - going too deep into the guts of this thing without knowing what your fingers are doing can severely cause injuries. Memory issues can often lead to a straight-up zombie process that needs to be killed. But then an exorcist is needed, to fix any existing daemon leftovers, or you'll be left wondering why the heck the issue repeats itself after a clean compile.

Why not start off with some autopsy of existing codes before getting your hands dirty though? Though I feel sorry that even an experienced coder would scratch his head for weeks, trying to read through the gibberish of the really ugly style used in most public projects, before giving up and hitting the "Create new directory" button.