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602 sats \ 2 replies \ @shafemtol 18 Mar \ parent \ on: 100k sat prize for solving bitcoin seed phrase puzzle bitcoin
So far I've found ~1000 million matching unordered combinations, still far from complete. Search is returning about 1 million new combinations per minute.
There was a new hint published giving what is presumably the master public key:
Currently I'd estimate an exhaustive search of all permutations of all possible word combinations to take at least 2^67 SHA-512 operations. The expected number of operations needed to find the correct seed would be half that, i.e. at least 2^66 operations.
For comparison, mining a single Bitcoin block currently takes about 2^78 SHA-256 operations. That's up to 4000 times as many operations. That's with specialized hardware, and SHA-256 might take a little less work compared to SHA-512, and the prize is higher, currently at least 6.25 BTC.
So finding the seed is probably doable, but not cost-effective at a 100k sat prize.
You are a beast. It's amazing that there are so many combinations even with 5 or 6 letters of the alphabet removed.
He probably should have come up with a seed phrase that didn't have any e's and a couple other popular letters. Might have made it doable.
Looks like we should take up mining instead of random puzzles on twitter.
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One potentially real case would be one in which a Cryptosteel or equivalent has broken apart and scattered the individual letters, leaving only a few initial letters from each row still intact. That would result in a much smaller search space.
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