You need to get some serious help, and you need to stop using ChatGPT to write texts for you. I don't know if what you're doing is allowed or not here, but it shouldn't be.

Do we have any further proof of the authenticity of the puzzle, other than the image being designed elaborately and the outputs still being unspent after years? For we know:

Transaction was made on May 2020.
First appearance of the image is on Reddit by /u/stsh_n on October 2020.

The transaction also had another output of 0.05 BTC, which is still unspent today, but not mentioned as part of the puzzle in the Reddit post.

Regarding trying the combinations, it's pretty much infeasible. If the puzzle is authentic, there has to be an absolute pattern in which you can gather the words and their order. You can come up with so many different words even if you look at clues appearing in the image. I believe the first reasonable step would be to come up with where words come from or how to get them, and then their order, and evidence of the system working.

It's been way too long since the puzzle was shared. The puzzle creator should sign a message and verify the address is in their control. There's all sorts of symbolism and hints and clues pointing to decentralization, injustice, modern world problems, but the lack of a signed message proving the ownership of the given address makes it less believable.

Anyone still working on this? Willing to exchange info privately.

Let me clarify this, it's really difficult to look at it manually and solve it, but it's possible. Basically we assign one value from 1234, each meaning top left, top right, bottom left, bottom right (I'm not sure what directions these actually are in my code, as the puzzle is a bit different in my mind). Each character in a 6-char cipher block maps to one of these. For C1, this value is 234134.


L corresponds to 2 -> choose 1 of 4 directions, the direction that we assign as 2. Read the connection of the direction, and we get "a".
1 corresponds to 4 -> we choose 4th direction. Read the connection, and we get "b".

If you're asking how I managed to find it, I kind of manually tried in my program, which prints the resulting mapping combinations for any given string with 6 numerical characters ranging from 1 to 4. If I input "111111" then I try to read one direction connection for all characters in C1 or C2, like "choose the black card character bottom right of the chosen silver card character, given 1 out of 12 placement.

Basically each character in a 6-character cipher block corresponds to exactly one direction. And this value differs for the cipher block characters in C2. Consequently, "a" and "b" are order markers, taking their value from the word "incomputable", so 9th and 10th letters, which correspond to first two words. Then, each word has one of the letters in their beginning.

Hey everyone, winner here, in this post I’m going to share my method of how I’ve solved it. The ciphertexts seemed simpler than I initially thought, but with some additional rules that I didn’t expect at first. I’ve written Python scripts to work with the puzzle to get the solution, but they were done quickly and in a very terrifying manner, so let me warn you about the code spaghetti. Also spoiler warning for those who want to solve on their own.

First of all, we need to define the character set in the black card, and a way to get which letter can correspond to them. We need to create a function that gets combinations of 12 silver card placements, while also defining silver card sides A and B, char at index 0 meaning first silver card char on top left most corner, index 1 to the right of the previous one etc. :


Now, we have a function to set combinations of strings for each placement, and we need to define another function to input a silver card character, and get back possible 4 connections on any given card placement combination:


I was mostly manually trying around different combinations and placements using the functions above. There are some really interesting two blocks in C1:


We know that the first 4 letters are used from the hints, and if we need to use one card placement (out of 12) for all of the ciphertext, then these two blocks must have similar words. Namely:


Now we have an idea of what kind of a structure we’re working with. 4 letters are used, and they shift left with every word by one character.

In my program, I wrote a simple for loop to loop over known seed phrase word letters, and I kind of got lucky looking at the connecting black card chars for them. In one of the last combinations, they map perfectly.

However, the order of choosing 4 possible characters in the silver card for a given black card character differs. How do you find that out? Well, I’m still not sure what the first 3 and the last 3 characters in C1 and C2 mean, but they might be about choosing the placement, and choosing the cycle in which 1 out of 4 letters to choose every character in the block, although these both variables are different for C1 and C2. Looking at possible mapping for that last one placement in C1, this pattern shows up:


Assigning one of the 4 directions (top left, top right, bottom left, bottom right), each character in the ciphers are assigned these, which determine the connecting silver card character to choose.

My next script originally iterated through all possible combinations, that's why it has 0,6 and 0,2. 0,6 for all the ways a silver card can be placed, and 0,2 for two sides of the silver card. Below I define a function to input a black card character “chrc”, and a number “num” for position encoding in the cipher block:


Now we can input any black character we want, and we get all the possible combinations if we set c to range from 0 to 6, and s to 0, 2. But to decipher C1, we need to take the specific combination 5,6 to 1,2, which corresponds to one of 12 card placement and side to choose. I believe I discovered the combination by luck, as it happened to be the last one being printed on my Python console.

But which block should we start from? We know that 4 letters are used for each seed phrase, and C1 and C2 both start with “URU” and end with “5ef”. So perhaps we can start with the second block, right?

Using the function above, and setting the block character values for each position “234134”, we get the first word as follows:


Very interesting! Now let’s try to apply this algorithm to all of ciphertext C1, with the script below:
(sorry for horrible variable naming)


And when we input the C1 stored in old_cipher variable, we get this result:


Incredible! We can see all the words! But hold on, there are no numbers or anything to mark the orders? Without the order, these words would be completely useless, as the possible combinations of these words are way too many to bruteforce.

Let’s try to write down the single characters between each word, shall we?


Now what does this mean? Well, we have the word “incomputable” on silver cards. This word determines the order of words.


When you use this knowledge to put the words in order, you get the words and the correct word order. Now, that we have an idea of how C1 is made, we can input the program the ciphertext C2, and let’s see the result:


Well… That didn’t work as expected. This must mean the block characters have a different mapping, and a different placement out of 12 is used. At this part of the puzzle, I was just manually printing different combinations and pos values. But the interesting thing is, you can sort of approach the correct plaintext slowly for C2 by modifying one thing at a time. It turns out, the mapping for C2 is “312134”, and combination (3,4) (0,1) is used, so c=3, side=0.


Wow. It fits perfectly, and the letters of incomputable are all also there. So when you put them together in the correct order, we get the 12 seed phrase words in correct order for C2:


However, there’s one more problem. The checksum isn’t correct! This seed phrase is invalid! But all of them are valid BIP39 words! Well, again perhaps to my luck, I was trying different word combinations (maybe pride is price? prize? Another layer to get the sats?)

I remembered that there might be 3-letter words, and I tried the easiest thing I can think of: ski instead of skin.

And that was it!

Thanks again OP for this challenge, and I’m looking forward to the next one. There’s still two questions left in my mind: How do we choose which card placement to choose? How are cipher blocks connection choices determined? I believe the answer might be in the first and last blocks of the ciphers. Perhaps I will try to look into it more.

Hey, it was me! I've PM'd OP with some proof. Thanks for the fun and good luck everyone! I won't spoil anything!

I mean, IF some part of the plaintext actually looks like this, I'm just making this up by giving an example:
to4ol%.
1prop0e#
se@mi3n
....
Upon deciphering a part of the given C1, you could see there's tool 4, prope 10 (for property), semin 3 (for seminar), and that would be enough for you to make out the rest of your 12 word seed phrase.

If the plaintext looks like above, then the challenge immediately becomes even harder, even to figure out how to go backwards. This would mean we are working with a more obfuscated, altered, reordered, and with missing parts of the actual plaintext (if smaller number of letters are used for each word).

Thanks for the challenge! It's been a blast trying to solve it for the past 2 days. There's so many pieces of information we can think of, although connecting them all together is quite difficult.

One thing that I'm struggling with, do we actually know the plaintext S1? If the word have letters omitted from them, if there's symbols in numbers that can mark the word orders, extra obfuscation characters for more security, and if everything is in a securely random mixed position, doesn't that make S1 different from the actual plaintext? Or should we assume that the substitution rules involve those changes in positions, how to place marker numbers for the order (if there's one), going by the 12 word seed phrase in order?

"arena brisk seminar..."

Do we actually start with the seed phrase to end up with the C1, or is there arbitrary personal choices involved BEFORE applying the rules to substitute, that is out of cards' reach? I believe if the latter is the case, then it's much more difficult. I'm not sure if its unsolvable, but this "starting point" is really important.

Either way, I constantly find new things to try and connect them. It raises some important questions about how such a product might work, for better or worse.