Below that, we see some sort of a timer counting down, and below that, an animated gif with a television looping through a series of images.

Underneath the GIF is a text entry box, and a button underneath to submit the form that says “I know it”.

The television is showing the story of DCR and PoS.

5 tickets are chosen randomly from the pool

If at least 3 of them vote ‘yes’

The proof of work is validated

The miners are compensated

The transaction clears

(Silence ensues)

The flashing light on top of the television is a binary transmission. The GIF has 128 frames, so if we extract and convert to binary, we get:

01000011 01001111 01010010 01000101 00100000 01010100 01001111 01001111 00100000 01010000 01000001 01001001 01001110 01000101 01000100

Run this through a binary->ASCII converter and we get

CORE TOO PAINED

OK, that’s got to be something. But it doesn’t do anything when you put in in the entry box. Maybe it’s an anagram.

OPERATION CODES

Oh, OP_CODES! OK, let’s head over to the list of opcodes in Decred!

There are 6 Decred-specific opcodes.

OP_SSTX = 0xba // 186 DECRED

OP_SSGEN = 0xbb // 187 DECRED

OP_SSRTX = 0xbc // 188 DECRED

OP_SSTXCHANGE = 0xbd // 189 DECRED

OP_CHECKSIGALT = 0xbe // 190 DECRED

OP_CHECKSIGALTVERIFY = 0xbf // 191 DECRED

Let’s start entering them, shall we?

OP_SSTX

Cool, that worked! A gear appears above the entry box. (with a Roman numeral II marked on it)

Also, the sequence of images on the TV seems to have changed. Now it is showing the original sequence plus the process of a ticket being revoked.

OP_SSRTX

That did something — Another gear appeared! (marked I)

And the sequence of images on the TV changed again. Now it displays a ticket purchase and a successful ticket voting process.

OP_SSGEN

Another gear!

At this point the whole TV image disappears. We are left with the wall of gears, the 3 individual gears that have appeared, the entry box and the “I know it” button.

At this point, players were stuck for a looong time. People tried many things including Enigma, spiral ciphers, and looking for hidden data or symbols in the gear image. It was generally agreed that the gears went into the “gate” in the following order, from top to bottom:

II I III

This corresponded to the order in which they appear when you discover them, as well as their appearance relative to the rest of the gate image in terms of texture and shadow angle.

The solution is to measure the diameter of each gear’s cam shaft in pixels. Dividing each of these diameters by 10 yields a sequence of steps. You must move through the gears, turning each one counterclockwise by the number of steps specified by it’s cam shaft.