I think the puzzle idea is that, if you could figure out a weakness in the hash, you could claim it faster than the brute force approach. So each prize that's claimed "on schedule" supports the idea that there aren't any widely known shortcuts.

Obviously if you found a shortcut in the hash you might do other things first, but I think that's the idea.

Hmm yeah if I cracked Bitcoin then last thing I'd do is claim a prize that gave away the fact that I'd cracked Bitcoin.

There is a difference between a weakness and complete breakage. You might have a small edge over brute force, but not enough to reverse any public key. This acts like a canary for weaknesses.

some people just want the cred though. their name will be immortal and live through history as being something, or some such nonsense that feeds an ego.

also, if you were the type that thinks bitcoin is lame, this could be a way of undermining the concept to the point that people no longer use it because it's not secure as it was touted

What you would do is claim the prize slightly ahead of schedule and wait to be slightly ahead of schedule for the next one.

What would you do?

I'd claim the prize, sell for USD, then watch BTC crash

It would crash before you could sell it. Guarantee major market makers are watching these wallets specifically, and autonomously.

So if someone figures out how to do it, they then effectively have a button that destroys a massive amount of wealth worldwide owned by a pretty specific group of people? That's fascinating, with billions of dollars at stake people would absolutely kill for that, not to mention the governments that use crypto on a macro scale for avoiding sanctions etc. Would probably make a really good thriller.

My theory: The wealth would probably effectively transfer to holders of other currencies. You aren’t really destroying wealth by destroying currency; the supply of stuff is still available. Just now the demand for it from crypto-holders is gone, so it’d get cheaper for USD-holders.

It'd be possible to guess it right first time, though, in theory, if you were really, really lucky.

A lot of puzzles (e.g. sudoku) are things you could solve with a SAT/SMT solver

PoW crypto is an exercise in finding new ways to spin boiling the oceans as actually being productive.

Electricity net controllers here are pretty happy when I boil some ocean on a sunny day. In fact at times they give me money for it. And then I can donate sats to indie content creators using podcasting 2.0 features.

But I think you are one of those people that threw out that baby with the bath water long ago.

Where is here for you?

Netherlands, on an ANWB, variable, energy contract [0]

[0] https://www.anwb.nl/energie (Dutch)

The kind of use you describe is almost certainly a small minority of the whole.

It’s certainly growing. We have many issues here where solar panel are turned off at peak hours. People get less and less money for delivering power to the net, and indeed sometimes have to pay to do so. This will only increase.

In fact solar panel sales are dropping very fast.

I'd assume there's a hint, but I can't find anything

Optimization and efficiency are sometimes underappreciated puzzles. We know that the air contains nitrogen for example but without the wild efficiency of the Haber process, most of us would likely be dead right now.

Custom silicon and all kinds of related optimizations were likely used to successfully brute-force this number.