Congrats to the folks who solved it
I was impressed that the first people who solved it left some ETH for the subsequent people to share after they solved it, so there were 3 people who took part in the bounty:
- NateAlex
- Anon 0x5b1b — who revealed themselves to me, but not publicly so I’ll respect that
- Anon 0xFBB4
There was 0.07 left on the account, so I bought a Super Geisha with it as a fun additional reward for latecomers, but 0xFBB4 took that too, so … boo.
As of writing this davidbridgeman.eth ‘tagged’ the account with a small transfer, so also counts as a puzzle solver.
The Solution
Clue: ‘They share a certain DNA’
Most of the projects I work on have been inspired by the system of randomization used by Art Blocks — that is to say there’s a uniquely generated 64-character hash used as the random seed. My project 27-Bit Digital and Excess Bits make direct use of the bits in that hash to create a randomized art piece.
Subsequent projects, Savage Droids and mxtter also are derived from a randomized hash generated at mint time on the blockchain. This is important to me because it makes the projects provably random.
Not a lot of people seem to care if projects are provably random these days — but it’s how you can be assured that the team behind the project isn’t giving their friends the best drops!
In order to solve the puzzle you needed to find the random hash for the two projects mentioned.
First key — 0xC5e38233Cc0D7CFf9340e6139367aBA498EC9b18
I said the first key was on my Twitter profile page and shared a screenshot saying it’s immediately in view. A few people focused on my Meebit avatar, or the background graphics I borrowed from the film Alien, but really it’s more obvious than that.
I said: “It starts with me” — meaning, literally me, as I am represented on the blockchain via my wallet address
The ENS name kai.pcc.eth resolves to my wallet address: 0xC5e38233Cc0D7CFf9340e6139367aBA498EC9b18 — that’s the first key.
Second key — 0x5ed010315f065a733673877fe29fc3ba96207df576a0069497b7c92456b832ea
This is the piece 27-Bit Digital #19 — but I didn’t give the edition number, so you either had to browse through and find the match, or use one of the clues that would follow, which was meant as a shortcut.
To get the random, 64-character hash from the piece, you either needed to do some digging into the source code of the generative piece on Art Blocks — or you needed to realize how 27-Bit Digital and Excess Bits are linked. If you know how they are linked, then you know that they share the same random hash, and Excess Bits #19 will also give you the key:
Third key — 0x03e7684bf4620acd93e9a90e7466ee2ecc285d4c966445a63601055315679f79
As above, this took figuring out that the depicted artwork is Excess Bits #73 — which may have been easier to figure out if you got the clue…
Clue — “I often try to relate things back to my birth year”
Again this was just the shortcut to help you figure out #19 and #73 of the two tokens I chose.
Clue — “One of my favorite artists is Elliott Smith”
The link above is to the album by Elliott Smith, Either/Or — which aside from being a great album, is also meant to be a hint about the mathematical operation XOR — which is how you put all the keys together.
Putting it all together
One of the first things I did was point out that you’d need to pick the right online tool.
Even though I would have preferred people to calculate it themselves, I thought that would be too much to ask
If you figured out you needed to use the XOR calculator, then it was just a matter of combining all the keys into a single 64-character hex string.
I also said …
So you would have needed to realize that the 64-character hex string was the private key for the wallet address holding the 1 ETH.
So that’s the solution!
Drain away that last ETH if you can be bothered! Maybe someday when ETH reaches to $100M, a digital archeologist will find this post and be a millionaire — which given inflation, should buy them a nice Big Mac.
As was pointed out, I did actually share a random Discord of mine so that folks could come together and try to figure out the puzzle, so if having a direct line to me and that group is interesting to you here ya go: https://discord.gg/qctfWKCQ8u
More to come!
Seems like you like the puzzles, so I’ll have to do more in the future.
