I finally solved an actual puzzle hiding a crypto prize !

After banging my head against the walls during the Spacepirategames Age Of Rust Beta Text/Audio puzzle and the Pineapple Arcade puzzles (BTW, the Pineapple Arcade one still has a 15 ETH private key and 2 different big BTC prizes unclaimed !!), I'd been keeping an eye on other easier puzzles to try my head at.

While roaming around on twitter, where I was initially checking how many contestants had signed up for the PINK64 Challonge tournament, It's still half-empty, why not join us ?, I found a tweet by cryptoArte, on a puzzle they had released a couple of days ago !

With 12 encrypted segments, we can already guess that this is encoding a 12-word mnemonic passphrase for an ETH address.

But what's the correspondence ?

attempt 1 : Not quite as simple as that

Being slightly color-blind can be a bit of a challenge in these situations, as at first I didn't notice the slight differences in the symbols.

I started out doing something relatively simple. Trying to take each symbol underneath a letter and finding the corresponding symbols in the encrypted words.

I did this without zooming in or properly examining the symbols, so it didn't turn out that accurate...

There was an attempt...

That's about as far as I got when I noticed there was a glaring error. The two "L" at the beginning of the third word corresponded to no words at all, and thus couldn't be part of a mnemonic passphrase XS

So, I decided to approach it as logically as possible.

Attempt 2 : There's a pattern here, I can feel it !

When looking at just what I'd managed to figure out, I saw that there was something of a recurrent theme.

So, I decided to map the symbols to the alphabet, to see if something interesting popped out !

A pattern seems to be emerging !

As you can see, the organization I choose, grouping by 5 letters, let's us see the emerging pattern much easier than if I had listed every letter sequentially on one long line.

The pattern that emerges can be seen really well if we take the first letter in each grouping :

The addition of colored circles seems to distinguish individual groupings !

and if we take the grouping of letters that has the most members:

The groupings seem to progress from a flat 2-segment to a 6-segment shape !

As we can see, the 5-letter groupings all contain the same basic shapes, progressing from a 2-segment shape to a 6-segment shape, sequentially.

whereas the groupings themselves are distinguished by the addition of colored circles underneath these segment shapes.

These observations let's us fill out our alphabet using the shapes present in the coded message !!

Certain letters not being used, here's our completed alphabet.

With this, we have as much as solved the puzzle !

All that's left is to use the above symbol-to-letter conversion chart to find the 12 mnemonic words.

I won't give the answer away here (You'll need to work for it, though the address is empty now I'll let you be the judge of that XP)

But you can confirm the address from the puzzles mnemonic, as well as that it was me who solved it, pretty easily by checking these two addresses:

Puzzle address, where you can see me transferring in the necessary ETH for the transfer fees as well as sending the CARTE token to my own wallet.

My ENS domain, which is linked to the wallet I transferred the CARTE token to: peterbock.eth

There was some difficult in getting the CARTE token to send to me though.

Using Metamask, I could only do the classic TransferFrom() function of a token contract, and that failed twice, leading to this harrowing message:

So, after some back and forth tweeting with CryptoArte, I used MEW's Contract interaction interface to send the CARTE token using the SafeTransferFrom() function, which worked like a charm !

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I loved solving this puzzle.

I've always been a puzzle aficionado. One of my favorite "relaxing"puzzles is the BrainString:

The concept is simple. Move the colored beads around the sides that are connected, mixing and knotting the strings inside, then give it to someone and tell them to de-knot the insides so you get a BrainString like the one above, with no lines crossing inside. Truly a wonderful puzzle !

Of course, it doesn't mean I'm particularly good at solving puzzles. I just have a certain patience when trying to solve a problem...

I realized how bad I actually was when I attempted to solve the Age of Rust and Pineapple Arcade puzzles I mentioned at the start of the post...

But practice makes perfect, so if no-one solved those 15 ETH and 10 BTC puzzles in the Arcade in the next couple of months, maybe I'll stumble upon the answer hehe.

Anyone else here a huge puzzle fan ?

PS: For anyone who got this far... I hope you paid attention when reading this article... especially to the barred out text near the end ;)