From the reddit thread, there's some information on how the basic wallet was solved.: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nUAhlC_n21ZLZcRAHpLw9G--...
Re:310 Bitcoin challenge has been solved
by zawerf on Thursday October 11, 2018 @08:24PM
(#18198146)
Man I was totally off on how those hexes are used. Thanks for the link!
Also, that's just for the basic wallet with 0.1 BTC in it.
Re:310 Bitcoin challenge has been solved
by sometime on Thursday October 11, 2018 @09:12PM
(#18198355)
How out of possibly hundreds of different operations that could take the hex table and and that date in possibly 5 different date formats as arguments, would you find out that it's shift key and YYYYMMDD?
Re:310 Bitcoin challenge has been solved
by nothrabannosir on Thursday October 11, 2018 @10:06PM
(#18198570)
Wild guess: start with shift key "301", see "201" come out. Use an 8 for the next, and it's a 3. Bingo.
(I would never in a million lifetimes have guessed that bip thing. How do people even know this?)
BIP39 and 12 word phrases to backup/restore your wallet is common knowledge in the cryptocurrency community.
Re:310 Bitcoin challenge has been solved
by nodesocket on Friday October 12, 2018 @01:22AM
(#18199409)
I think the question is going from decimals to bip39 seed words.
Looking at 426 252 813 1535 1935 1603 1068 1479 1168 756 878 1083 I sure as heck would not think, oh that's bip39 indexes.
I noticed it on the reddit.com /codes subreddit a couple of days ago. It was already solved for the big prize (310).
There are 18 three digit hexadecimals in the puzzle. If the answer is a permutation of these, then that's just 18 factorial which is 6.4 * 10^15. That is totally bruteforcable without even thinking about the puzzle (and totally worth spinning up a cluster for).
I don't know anything about bitcoin though and 54 characters seems too short to be a private key? You can also brute force 10 more interspersed characters for a slowdown factor of 16^10 * (64 choose 10) = 9.9 * 10^15. So then it's a total cost of 6.3*10^31. Still bruteforceable but more expensive if you're wrong about it.