<p>Is <a href="https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/transactions/btc/8c8ec6b3511c62500ea9b3a1c30ca937e15d251b55d30290a2a6da2f1124f3fb" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this</a> what you are looking for?</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2024-10-07T03:05:02.830Z
Probably. Could you expand this into an answer? E.g. how did you locate this transaction?
Quuxplusone
CC BY-SA 4.0
2024-10-05T21:27:41.460Z
2024-10-05T21:27:41.460Z
Jan Janssen
<p>There's a thing called &quot;Bitcoin Puzzles&quot; where someone (anonymous) has placed relatively large amounts of bitcoin under private keys and publicly advertised that those keys are mostly-all-bits-zero. So the game is to discover the mostly-zero private key by brute force, and then claim the bitcoin.</p>
<p>But of course claiming the bitcoin requires submitting a transaction to the pool, and that transaction is going to include the corresponding public key; and (for math reasons I have not investigated personally) if you know the public key then the difficulty of brute-forcing the private key goes from 2^{k} down to something like 2^{k/2} — i.e., instantaneous, for the number of nonzero bits we're talking about in these puzzles.</p>
<p>So, when Bitcoin Puzzle #66 was recently solved, it was quickly rumored that what had really happened was:</p>
<h2>Theory #1, the clever bot</h2>
<ul>
<li>Some poor guy spends years brute-forcing a 66-bit private key.</li>
<li>He submits a transaction, including the public key, asking for 6.6BTC to be transferred from the prize address to himself.</li>
<li>Some random bot has been watching the pool for years for exactly this moment. The bot takes a few tens of seconds to brute-force the now-effectively-33-bit private key, and submits its own transaction consuming the same input but with a higher transaction fee</li>
<li>The bot's transaction thus <a href="https://bitcoinops.org/en/topics/replace-by-fee/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">replaces</a> the poor guy's transaction, and is mined, giving the prize money to the bot. Poor guy spent years of brute-force time for nothing.</li>
</ul>
<p>But of course there are at least two competing theories:</p>
<h2>Theory #2, the boring one</h2>
<ul>
<li>Some guy spends years brute-forcing a 66-bit private key. He submits the transaction; nobody front-runs him; he just made $400,000. The end.</li>
</ul>
<h2>Theory #3, the puzzlemaster cheated</h2>
<ul>
<li>The anonymous puzzlemaster, who knows all the private keys by definition, <em>could</em> have submitted his own transaction to take out the money at any time (say, to buy another house). That would look the same as if anyone else brute-forced the puzzle legitimately; so as far as evidence goes, Theory #3 is indistinguishable from Theory #2.</li>
</ul>
<hr />
<p>All of the Bitcoin Puzzle addresses are (apparently) listed here:
<a href="https://privatekeyfinder.io/bitcoin-puzzle" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://privatekeyfinder.io/bitcoin-puzzle</a></p>
<p>This is the address for Bitcoin Puzzle #66:
<a href="https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/btc/13zb1hQbWVsc2S7ZTZnP2G4undNNpdh5so" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/btc/13zb1hQbWVsc2S7ZTZnP2G4undNNpdh5so</a></p>
<p>And this is the winning transaction (IIUC):
<a href="https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/transactions/btc/57a88f47e4c047740b782a5562fca143ce85de0373cbff3a7d406e9ae7fc2f5f" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/transactions/btc/57a88f47e4c047740b782a5562fca143ce85de0373cbff3a7d406e9ae7fc2f5f</a></p>
<p>My question is, <strong>Is there any &quot;physical evidence&quot; remaining that might corroborate which theory is correct?</strong> Specifically, if there were something like <code>blockchain.com/explorer</code> for <em>unconfirmed</em> transactions, then we could look at it and say &quot;Oh, that's interesting; an unconfirmed transaction against the prize address at 18:57:00 with a 50000-sat fee, followed by another unconfirmed transaction at 18:59:20 with a 75000-sat fee, and then a confirmed transaction at 18:59:39 with a 76400-sat fee, and then several more invalid transactions in the five minutes after <em>that</em>.&quot; — That <em>would</em> be strong evidence for Theory #1 (IIUC); but as far as I know, there's no public (or reliable private) record that would be able to provide that kind of information — right?</p>
<p>...Actually, I just found <a href="https://stacker.news/items/683489" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this stacker.news story</a>, which points to an unconfirmed transaction 8c8ec6b and links to a page on <a href="https://mempool.space/tx/8c8ec6b3511c62500ea9b3a1c30ca937e15d251b55d30290a2a6da2f1124f3fb" rel="nofollow noreferrer">mempool.space/tx</a> as corroboration of Theory #1. That page is... well, it's gone <em>now</em>. And it was never archived by the Wayback Machine nor by archive.is. So I guess I might be asking whether there's any other historical record of the information ephemerally available on mempool.space; or perhaps some subset of such information &quot;of historical interest.&quot;</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2024-10-05T21:12:57.667Z
More discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41547395
Jan Janssen
<mempool><history><news-coverage><mempool.space>
Bitcoin Puzzle 66: Is this unconfirmed transaction archived anywhere?
Quuxplusone
# Bitcoin Puzzle 66: Is this unconfirmed transaction archived anywhere?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2024-09-20)

There's a thing called "Bitcoin Puzzles" where someone (anonymous) has placed relatively large amounts of bitcoin under private keys and publicly advertised that those keys are mostly-all-bits-zero. So the game is to discover the mostly-zero private key by brute force, and then claim the bitcoin.

But of course claiming the bitcoin requires submitting a transaction to the pool, and that transaction is going to include the corresponding public key; and (for math reasons I have not investigated personally) if you know the public key then the difficulty of brute-forcing the private key goes from 2^{k} down to something like 2^{k/2} — i.e., instantaneous, for the number of nonzero bits we're talking about in these puzzles.

So, when Bitcoin Puzzle #66 was recently solved, it was quickly rumored that what had really happened was:

## Theory #1, the clever bot

* Some poor guy spends years brute-forcing a 66-bit private key.
* He submits a transaction, including the public key, asking for 6.6BTC to be transferred from the prize address to himself.
* Some random bot has been watching the pool for years for exactly this moment. The bot takes a few tens of seconds to brute-force the now-effectively-33-bit private key, and submits its own transaction consuming the same input but with a higher transaction fee
* The bot's transaction thus [replaces](https://bitcoinops.org/en/topics/replace-by-fee/) the poor guy's transaction, and is mined, giving the prize money to the bot. Poor guy spent years of brute-force time for nothing.

But of course there are at least two competing theories:

## Theory #2, the boring one

* Some guy spends years brute-forcing a 66-bit private key. He submits the transaction; nobody front-runs him; he just made $400,000. The end.

## Theory #3, the puzzlemaster cheated

* The anonymous puzzlemaster, who knows all the private keys by definition, *could* have submitted his own transaction to take out the money at any time (say, to buy another house). That would look the same as if anyone else brute-forced the puzzle legitimately; so as far as evidence goes, Theory #3 is indistinguishable from Theory #2.

---

All of the Bitcoin Puzzle addresses are (apparently) listed here:
<https://privatekeyfinder.io/bitcoin-puzzle>

This is the address for Bitcoin Puzzle #66:
<https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/btc/13zb1hQbWVsc2S7ZTZnP2G4undNNpdh5so>

And this is the winning transaction (IIUC):
<https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/transactions/btc/57a88f47e4c047740b782a5562fca143ce85de0373cbff3a7d406e9ae7fc2f5f>

My question is, **Is there any "physical evidence" remaining that might corroborate which theory is correct?** Specifically, if there were something like `blockchain.com/explorer` for *unconfirmed* transactions, then we could look at it and say "Oh, that's interesting; an unconfirmed transaction against the prize address at 18:57:00 with a 50000-sat fee, followed by another unconfirmed transaction at 18:59:20 with a 75000-sat fee, and then a confirmed transaction at 18:59:39 with a 76400-sat fee, and then several more invalid transactions in the five minutes after *that*." — That *would* be strong evidence for Theory #1 (IIUC); but as far as I know, there's no public (or reliable private) record that would be able to provide that kind of information — right?

...Actually, I just found [this stacker.news story](https://stacker.news/items/683489), which points to an unconfirmed transaction 8c8ec6b and links to a page on [mempool.space/tx](https://mempool.space/tx/8c8ec6b3511c62500ea9b3a1c30ca937e15d251b55d30290a2a6da2f1124f3fb) as corroboration of Theory #1. That page is... well, it's gone *now*. And it was never archived by the Wayback Machine nor by archive.is. So I guess I might be asking whether there's any other historical record of the information ephemerally available on mempool.space; or perhaps some subset of such information "of historical interest."

**Tags:** mempool, history, news-coverage, mempool.space

> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: More discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41547395  

---

## 1 answers

### Answer by username_1 on 2024-10-05. Score: 0

Is [this](https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/transactions/btc/8c8ec6b3511c62500ea9b3a1c30ca937e15d251b55d30290a2a6da2f1124f3fb) what you are looking for?

> **Comments:**
> **username_0**: Probably. Could you expand this into an answer? E.g. how did you locate this transaction?  

---

