Monday, February 10, 2020

Update: someone has claimed it!

Thank you to everyone who reacted positively to the puzzle post, and apologies because I apparently miscounted the number of eligible seed words in the article. I don't have a program to figure this stuff out, so it might be there are well over 30 eligible words. But whether it's 30 (or 60) you probably won't be able to figure it out until more clues are revealed. I do know of at least one person who has already cracked it by running code, but he's going to leave the prize money for someone else, so thank you to all the "hackers" out there who are letting us plebs have some fun.

Before I reveal the next clue, I want to address something. Apparently there are people who think I'm trying to pull a scam with this puzzle. Yesterday I got the idea to share the next clue early for a small fee of $.25 on satoshiwall.cash. The intent was to add another dimension to this contest by encouraging people to actually use BCH as well as promoting satoshiwall at the same time and adding to the prize money. Unfortunately, this led to some accusing me of pulling a bait and switch and misleading people about the contest.

If you really think I'm trying to scam people, I want you to think about how that would work. I've put up .25 BCH of my own money to promote this thing. You think I'm going to make that back and profit with $.25 paywalls?

No, I'm not.

I promise I'm not trying to be the next Richard Heart. I am doing this purely because I enjoy using Bitcoin Cash and promoting it in whatever way I can. If you think what I'm doing is scammy, I'd love to hear a logical argument explaining why.

I think some members of the BCH community need to stop assuming someone is being a scammer just because you don't understand the reason behind their actions. Let's not automatically jump to the worst possible conclusion about one another. Let's do our research, but don't immediately dismiss someone as a scammer because you don't agree with them on a subject. Maybe their reasons are as legitimate as yours. In my case, I'm just trying to give back. I was excited and honored to win 1 BCH from the mythbusting contest put on by @btcfork, and I have been wanting to use that money to support the BCH ecosystem rather than just hodling it. That's why I recently put up the .5 BCH to pay for the banner art I've been using for this column, and now I'm using another .25 BCH for this contest.

I am proud to be able to say I've been a BCH supporter since early on. I consider myself what you might call a true believer. I hope that as I continue writing this column, this will become more apparent to the rest of the community. I am passionate about spreading peer to peer electronic cash, but since I can't code, or mine, and I'm not good at onboarding merchants, I see this as my way of contributing. And to be honest, it is discouraging to be accused of trying to scam people when I'm literally giving people free money with no strings attached.

Anyway, now that that's out of the way, here's the next clue in the puzzle. It's the easiest one you're going to get:

So the final word in the 12-word seed phrase is bind as in "This money is non bind ing." You can now eliminate all qualifying words that come after that sentence. And for those who didn't already know, now you see that the seed words can be a part of a larger word.

I hope people are having fun with this. I've decided I like doing the satoshiwall preview, so I'm going to keep doing it. If you're interested in getting an early look at clue #6 before I publish it in my next column, you can pay a quarter and see it by clicking on this link. This time I'll be smart enough to use the prize money address as the receiving address, so you can see your unlock going to the prize address net of the 10% satoshiwall fee rather than me forwarding the payment.

I also figured out a way to hold this contest so that it can't be brute forced using a computer. So depending on how this goes, maybe I'll run this again but using a different format.

As always, thanks for reading.