Here are the messages encoded in the QR codes. I couldn't get a few of them to read, I would need to manually clear them up a bit for the reader to understand them. These are roughly left to right, top to bottom.

• You pass through two large iron doors into a large chamber. There are magical symbols inscribed on the walls. A strange mechanical sculpture of rusted gears and pipes dominates the space of the room. Beneath the sculpture is a vent emitting hot steam.
• You nearly fall into a pit of deadly iron spikes. You see a shadowy figure in your peripheral, but when you turn to look, no one is there.
• The corridor is lined with pulsating light bulbs in iron sconces. In an alcove there is a fallen statue with an inscription “When azoth and fire whiten Latona, Diana comes unclothed.”
• A corridor is before you. There is a dim flickering bulb at the end of the corridor. You're not sure if it's your eyes adjusting to the low light or if you see a shadowy figure wavering in the distance.
• Skeletons hang from chains and manacles against the walls. The floor is covered with iron gears, rusted scrap metal, and empty glass vials. You discover a leather jacket.
• In a small damp room there are metal gears exposed in the eroding floor. The gears are rusted and beyond repair. A clanking sound can be faintly heard in the distance. Someone has scrawled “He who can burn with water and wash with fire makes a heaven of earth and a precious earth of heaven.”
• An iron chandelier hangs from the ceiling here. There is a bookcase, you discover it pivots smoothly and reveals a secret door. In the small secret room there is a book lying open on an iron podium. The book is titled "Mechanica Mathematica," there are pages torn out.
• The walls have been engraved with geometric patterns. An iron altar sits in the corner of the room with an inscription “If you make the earth fly upside down, with its wings you may convert torrential waters to stone.”
• There is an iron passageway, it is very dark, you walk slowly with your hand against the wall guiding you... just in case. You come across a fortified iron door guarded by two mechanical gargoyles. There is an inscription on the door “The dragon guards the key.”
• http://i.imgur.com/Uh3Cfiu.jpg
• http://i.imgur.com/L3R809v.png
• You are in an iron chamber. There are strange mechanical devices strewn about the room. It is dusty and the air is stale. On the wall someone has scrawled “The diameter of the sphere, the tau in the circle, and the cross of the globe bring no joy to the blind.”
  
• http://textadventures.co.uk/games/view/5craldfdmkkzngf1davsna/days-destroyed
• You are in a large chamber, there is a domed ceiling above you. An iron sarcophagus sits in the center of the room with an inscription that reads “SI SEDES NON IS.”
• http://i.imgur.com/qto5RaC.png

It seems to have something to do with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porta_Alchemica

The picture has many cells and the colors and triangles could all hold information. The QR codes are all also on specific coordinates in the grid, this is likely to be meaningful. They each have four or six studs around them, and the embossing on the QR code pattern itself has its light and shadow from different directions.

The html title for the image is "pipedream portal".

I couldn't get anywhere in the text adventure yet.

Did I hear tips going around?

If anyone found my posts helpful, any of these addresses I used to beg for hints would do...

1P1easednix73qDimELQFPWwXg6NrDv3Yz
1GiveRqozxuYDhfSkyd71TvGehoZVw4tQd
1hintKVc56csvsngEY1Qz1sgJeuspQC3o

1whatXcQA34sEVhfvJsrncVHnWrHhnEQA
1meanPuUfQACE6vLpLPheNPF5ttJMpemo
1redCUdsjuY8wFkzWRS2yBW6GYB4bY7sE
1andLjDxqPmwNcCVNz9aC3tGL9Rfg5vVp
1grnVQA6GeiSSKHYzpBuXUug1p4XEfDAb

Ps. To be honest, I probably would not have shared the prize with anyone, as the rules in original post were "winner keeps all", so whoever got the coins rightfully deserve them.

I would love to see more of these puzzles by OP, or by anyone else! I would love to design one, but I'm afraid I would leave behind too many careless mistakes and there's no way I could come up with such a exuberant prize.

Great, the last hint I needed dropped when my time zone sleeps.

Good game everybody, I hope you had as much fun as I did.

Oh, it imports fine on blockchain.com though. Maybe it is one of those other wallet import formats that it is defaulting to.

I was just going to post the exact same findings, except that at my end, I got the same key and it does convert to a public key. Namely, 1nchRAYGJofxyrkuhbL1CGYtD5x8Lowi5. It made my heart jump when I found it, but it is, alas, empty.

In addition to the "CHANNEL NUMBER, (TWO DIGITS, WRITTEN VERTICALLY)" and the numbers below that, the header right next to that has been moved a little bit.

Have a look at the difference between the original and the modified file:
http://i.imgur.com/rXn7XZ4.jpg

You can see it nudge around here:

http://i.imgur.com/0aDncXb.gif

Along with the XMP data describing traces of some random brushstrokes around the image (of which I composed perhaps a more accurate plot here) , I feel like this header moving is probably unrelated. Just mistakes left by the riddler. But I thought to share anyway! You have made so much progress and I haven't been able to contribute much after the minecraft and QR code phaze, so maybe you can find something meaninful in this too.

Sorry for the gigantic images.

> "Why is a raven like a writing desk?"

Poe wrote on both.

Here's how to get rid of black and white noise and focus only on the minor color differences:

http://i.imgur.com/ZD3RgCo.jpg

Convert to lab color, examine channel a or b, whichever has the most detail, and squeeze the most contrast you can get.

I will keep looking, but I don't think there is more information in this image at this point. The two pieces of text and the face.

http://i.imgur.com/sazdYrU.png
bit .ly/1juqeCj

bit . ly/you_can_also_define_your_own

Here is the enderman screenshot overlaid on the image. The triangle and these tiles match up.
http://i.imgur.com/fEpOgfP.jpg
The word "CoNtra" pops up to me. Inverted colors? Or reading backwards? The 987654321 transactions and the countdown refer to backwardsness as well.

I had a few slight mistakes in there, but what I did was to start from top left corner, green dot is a dash, red is a dot in morse. Every letter or yellow dot is a pause. When you reach the bottom or the end of the line at the bottom of the image, or because the two figures are in the way, just loop around to the top on the next column to the right. Convert that from morse to plaintext. If you seperate the english words out of that string, and take the first letters of each word, you get THEY CAN NOT ATTACT WHAT THEY CAN NOT SEE.

If you ignore the guys in the picture and loop the morse around, from top to bottom, left to right, you get
"tale hack evil yoke rode act nest noon time apex tilt trick ace catch key wish hash aim tech to hi techo youth dash one net oath tip set ether ent is top words"
and nonsense after that.

Heh, had the exact same idea yesterday.

Not only the dots, but I have my suspicions when it comes to the characters being spaced out instead of all together:

1) The number of of dots in between is meaningful. The cells overlapped by the figures still clearly show if they have a dot or not, so the number of dots seems to be very important.

2) In addition to the plaintext address being there, left-to-right, a clever riddlerer could have weaved it with a top-to-bottom (or diagonal, or other traversal pattern) message, incorporating the characters from the address to another message.

Thank you for a great summary.

All good points! I agree.

At this point, I'm the most intrigued as well as perplexed by the transactions, however I think the order of likelihood of meaningfulness is 1. rest of the text in the image, 2. dots, 3. transactions.

Asked for more hints and the countdown started again. This time all the way down to 0.001 BTC, missing 8 and 3, and 0.00899999 BTC instead of 0.009... A rounding error? There was one similiar one before.

I believe it is random.

After the "ZZZ" reply to my plead for hints, we get a bunch of 0.001011 BTC, and only now I realize that these and some older binary transactions have 0.00010001 as their miners' fee. Could be meaningful.

00101100 is a comma " , " in ascii.

A row of transactions to the address spell out an interesting ascii message:

0.01010011 BTC
0.01001111 BTC
0.01000011 BTC
0.01001100 BTC
0.01001111 BTC
0.01010011 BTC
0.00100010 BTC
0.01000101 BTC

If you ignore the one for 0.00100010, it spells "SOCLOSE"

0.00100010 is the smallest of the bunch, and the most likely to be an outside prankster sending confusing messages perhaps. It is a double quatation in ascii