4.87 BTC 1FLAMEN6 Puzzle
Prize: 4.87 BTC
Creator: coin_artist
Start Date: 2015-04-03
Solve Date: 2018-02-01
Address: 1FLAMEN6rq2BqMnkUmsJBqCGWdwgVKcegd
Private Key: ac928bf050d1292b8a3a1ef1139fd1e74cefc50005f29720d6bf309169537452
Description
There is 4.87 BTC contained within the image shown below via private key. Follow through this thread to help navigate yourself through the start to finish of this elaborate puzzle! There are a lot of cool crypto techniques used during this journey...
Solution
In the painting, the six ribbons tied around the key serve as a six-bit cipher that unlocks the rest of the puzzle. The ribbons come in two types: short and long, which correspond to the binary values 0 and 1, respectively. Thus, the cipher hidden in the key is 011010.
The private key to the Bitcoin wallet, encoded in the Wallet Import Format, is concealed in the flames. First, each character of the private key is translated into its binary equivalent. Then, additional data is added to the binary string, such as the phrase "b34u7y, truth, and rarity" at the beginning to indicate that the Bitcoin key has been found. The resulting 608-bit binary string is divided into 6-bit chunks, each of which is subjected to an XOR operation.
An XOR operation takes two binary inputs and produces a new string based on the comparison of the bits. If the input bits match, the output is 0. If they do not match, the output is 1. In this puzzle, the XOR operation is applied to the six-bit cipher derived from the ribbons on the key and each of the 6-bit chunks from the 608-bit string encoded in the flames. After the XOR operation is applied to the entire string, the resulting string is divided into 4-bit chunks.
Each 4-bit chunk represents a single flame in the photo, with each bit in the chunk corresponding to a specific characteristic of the flame. The characteristics are short (0) or tall (1), red (0) or yellow (1) border, narrow (0) or wide (1), and purple (0) or green (1) interior, in that order. For instance, a 4-bit chunk with the value 0110 represents a short (0), yellow border (1), wide (1), purple interior (0) flame in the painting. Once the four-bit value of each flame has been determined, they are arranged as one long string. The flames are read starting from the inner left of the painting's border in a clockwise direction and then the outer flames are read in a counterclockwise direction.