Believe me or not, but my "super-crazy-complicated-weird" puzzle have lived less than 28 hours.
Congratulations to @krishare, who found the "secret phrase" so quick.
Yes, indeed, the secret hidden 5 words were given back precisely and EXACTLY as I was expected:
DeFi = the future of LeoFinance
But first of all (as I will refer to a brain-wallet description page), my important warning again: Brain wallets are NOT SAFE. Never use them!
I know this not only from reading reports online. I have learned it myself the hard way. By loosing Bitcoin.
Back in the days when this happened to me (2014), not many people knew, how unsafe the brain wallets can be. No matter how long and complex the initial seed may seem to you, a 100-150 character string of words, names, dates, figures is still "easy money" for todays sophisticated cracking methods.
Seven years later I still can feel the pain of loosing "x-digits" large amount of Bitcoin. With prices ever surging, this pain seems will never go away.
So, here is a whole story.
I was browsing various pages about differences in HD wallet derivation path, about signing and verifying messages on blockchain. At some point I came across this page on github. I think I have seen it before, but this time my attention was grabbed by the implemented converted, converting various strings in Heximal, Decimal, Binary, Base58, Base64 formats. As there is an offline version to download that page, I saved it for my future use. Soon, while playing with it, I got hooked with POETRY cipher format. I said "What?" Never heard about it before. Tried to google - not much found either.
But it seemed this "poetry" method producing some interesting, good looking results:
Do you like this "been leave leave believe point coat around fail soar" ? 😀
Here came the idea to make a puzzle. I encoded my first from the top of my head phrase with a childish, probably well known ROT13 (just to make task a bit more difficult), and then converted into "poetry". If somebody has seen this "poetry" format before, my puzzle would be easy-money. If not - maybe a bit harder. I had no idea if the reply will come in 7 minutes, 7 hours or 7 days. Or never.
This made my second option to come - to make the price variable, slowly increasing with time.
Was it really a one, single copy-paste?
May sound ridiculous, but here is a proof (which you can easy duplicate):
Yes, perhaps quite a few mouse clicks in trying various TAB combinations, but only one real copy-paste 😀
Two cascaded encryption methods from the past century, right?
Does puzzles attract new people?
I think it does.
My pervious "lost paper-wallet" puzzle was published on 2021-01-19, and was solved by @cryptosneeze on 2021-01-24, who got registered his HIVE account just one day earlier, on 2021-01-23
This time things were even more extreme:
Puzzle published: 2021-03-05, 13:48
Winner @krishare got his HIVE acct: 2021-03-06, 12:08 (+22.3 h)
Puzzle answer publish: 2021-03-06, 17:46 (+5.5 h)
Time span from "days" came into "hours". How crazy it is?
Someone reported, people were even asking for a help in solving this on REDIT. Huh?
You can always find your own way !
Another interesting thing is, that winner have found his own way of solving the task. Which I was myself completely not aware of.
You can read about all this in the TOP comments thread under the original puzzle post.
So what do you think?
I think puzzles may be a good way to suck-in new people.
If you can create a good puzzle, but are not able to sponsor a good, proper prize for it - contact me on Discord.
I will see if we can do something together about it.