This post is a follow up on the challenge/competition set out 72 hours ago here. First off, no, no one took the bounty. That's the bad news. The good news is that I will let the bounty run over into the next challenge, effectively doubling it.
Here is the passphrase to the wallet: kswb
Together with the master seed from the post, it translates to the following Monero seed:
gyrate yahoo psychic assorted joining melting ahead yoyo gave diplomat fidget trendy nobody jargon vane after shelter zodiac morsel junk pager sample biscuit bugs shelter
Restore Date: 20220715 (or restore height 2671400 to skip irrelevant days)
Here is an assortment of great comments from observers/participants, which tells the story as good as I possibly could:
Ok so basically to derive the keys from a seed phrase it has to be run through some hashes and KDFs that are relatively fast to compute but to know the balance of a wallet you have to go through the whole blockchain looking for transactions from that address, digging into gigabytes of data takes much longer than those hashes.
By having the address you would only have to derive the address from the seeds and find the the seed where the derived address matches the one you have.
I won the last [dogecoin] challenge, and I have no idea how to go about this one. Good luck.
Nope, Monero's blockchain ain't open to everyone, it's opaque, the only thing you can see is whatever transactions belong to you, you can't lookup the ones from anyone else.
So, for each private key, you must scan the blockchain to see the transactions that belong to you, if you don't find anything you move to the next private key, which again, can only see its own transactions, so you need to scan the blockchain again and so on..
Privacy IS security.
Doesn't mater if you got the strongest password in the world, if someone knows exactly how much YOU own, they can show up at your house, threat you or your family, and force you to give out the pass. It's called a $5 wrench attack.
While to some people here this seems simple (after all, it’s just 500k seeds right?) it isn’t. Monero has no way of knowing the amounts stored in an address without rescanning the blockchain and processing every transaction made to check if the transaction was to a given address or from it. That is computationally expensive compared to typical bruteforcing which can take milliseconds at a time per address.
Anyone who has used XMR from years ago knows just how long it takes to restore a multi-year old wallet. The sync time can be literally hours for one address (if using a remote node). You can of course increase efficiency by writing custom tools to brute force it but the computational complexity does not change, you still need to check every transaction proof to know if they’re your own or not.
Without knowing the restore height, you’ll need to scan the entire blockchain (or make a guess roughly how long ago that seed had its first transaction) for every seed you generate. Assuming you knew the restore height and it was made fairly recently you can cut down the time needed but even then it’ll still take minimum, longer than the lifetime of an average person most likely to check those 500k possible seeds by scanning a few hundred thousand blocks for each.
If I’m wrong and someone does manage to crack this then color me impressed however just based off sync times alone, I firmly doubt anyone is getting that 15$ bounty.
Im in!
Thanks for creating this game. I love puzzles. Im playing, and I intend to win. But dont let me discourage others from playing. If I do win I will only take half of the balance so that at least one other person can also win.
EDIT: At the current rate, it will take 24 days to check all 457K combos. There is pretty much no chance I will find it in the 72 hours given. :(
I automated it. Running on an Intel i9 it will take 24 days to test all combos. So, avg luck will take 14 days. There seems like a small chance with only 72 hours in the contest, but I already write the code so Im running it and maybe I'll get lucky.
Either way, it was fun to set up, thanks for creating the puzzle!
I can test around 70k transactions per second with my very high-end CPU, on a pretty fast implementation, and I would need to check 95970000000 transactions to fully exhaust the search space for this challenge (assuming 30k txs per day), which would take me about 381 hours.
I just checked and I get around 1300 tx/s on a DigitalOcean CPU core, the biggest machine I can get is 8 cores, which costs $0.083 per hour. This means I would need around 2563 server-hours which would cost around $213. I would also need to spin up 50 servers to make it in the remaining 52 hours, and the default limit seems to be 10.
I would have spent that money just for fun, but it's not easily doable to get the compute without having an account already (most cloudserver providers have limits for new accounts).Edit: corrected all numbers, forgot to account for 2 outputs per tx (on avg).
Restoring a Monero wallet from block 0 takes some real time and resources. It could take an hour, depending on your hardware, to scan the blockchain from block 0 to the current blockchain height.
Brute forcing this is not feasible for most.
Badabapbopbaaa
Honourable mention to u/Tiny_Voice1563, u/VariousJackfruit, u/Federal-Smell-4050, u/dajohns1420 for constructive content :)
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