Quote from: Benjade on June 26, 2025, 07:03:33 PM

So yes, if you fund key 42 with no conditions, whoever signs first owns it. In the puzzle, the first signer already exists; a bot that shoves their transaction aside is just pickpocketing at mempool speed.

So untrue.... "Whoever moves the coins safely to his/her wallet owns the coins".
Bots are part of the competition, do you think the owner did not know that this RBF war would happen ?
Whoever has tried this challenge now fully knows why you shouldn't create a weak private key all thanks to bots.

Quote from: Benjade on June 26, 2025, 08:39:30 PM

The puzzle creator openly puts the coins in addresses meant to be cracked and even thanks the community for building new cracking tools. That is an implied green light: the only way to claim the prize is to derive the key, and the owner clearly intends that to happen. No computer system is being broken into and the funds are not protected by anything but the puzzle itself, so there is no “unauthorized access” under computer-crime laws. It is a public bounty, not theft. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1306983.msg18765941#msg18765941

Another thing, a bitcointalk forum post doesn't verify ownership of a bitcoin address, when Retiredcoder posted here the first time no one believed him till he signed a message from adresses 125 and 130, when Bram posted here he signed a message from his own address containing moved coins from address 67, the main reason "signed messages" were added to bitcoin wallet is to verify ownership.

What if we wake up tomorrow and someone signs multiple messages with addresses 140 to 160 saying he/she is the rightful owner of these coins, it was never a challenge, never intended for it to be bruteforced, an unfortunate circumstance happened and he/she went to jail for the last 10years, released recently and found out people are bruteforcing his/her coins, has now made a complaint to the authorities about this....
Would you still believe that bitcointalk forum post Huh

I think peoples' greed and lack of money clouds their judgment here.
If the owner wanted to prove legitimate ownership to these coins, nothing stops him signing a message with addresses 150, 155 and 160, state his intent about the coins and paste in a public forum.