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Comment by modeless | Hacker News Reader

I like how bitcoin enables people to set up puzzle bounties like this. Looks like there's a subreddit for it: https://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoinpuzzles/

I might monitor that sub for more bounties, I had no idea there was one this large floating around.

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The problem with these puzzles is that you never know if it's actually solvable until it's solved. The author of the puzzle could store any number of bitcoins in some wallet, publish a difficult but unrelated puzzle with the claim that the solution reveals the private keys to the wallet, then laugh while the internet goes on a wild goose chase. It's even more likely since the author is usually anonymous (obviously for good reason). They're fun to ponder over a little, but I'd never invest more time (or money) than I could afford to lose into any of these, no matter the prize.

True. But you can at least verify before starting that the nearly $2 million prize does exist, and is controlled by the creator of the puzzle.

Another problem is that even if the puzzle is legit, you can't claim your prize without wrecking havoc on the environment in the process. At an estimated 850 kWh [0] per transaction, you would need to have a pretty good excuse for performing transactions at all.

[0]: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

Important to mention, is that power consumption is not related to amount of transactions. If bitcoin would allow ten times the amount of transactions tomorrow, the power consumption would not increase.

Power consumption is related to difficulty and the rewards, which is linked to the price of a Bitcoin.

> Power consumption is related to difficulty and the rewards, which is linked to the price of a Bitcoin.

Difficulty is determined by the hash rate of the network. One would expect there to be a link between hash rate and price but that's correlation not causation.

Nonsense, if it costs you $5000 to mine a bitcoin and the price is $1000 then you have no reason to mine it and the hashpower would lower.

From a naïve perspective of only mining for profit that's sort of true.

Lots of people mine for other reasons.

Still probably not related to amount of transactions.

True, since the number of transactions is unrelated to the hashrate of the network.

The actual amount of energy consumed by one bitcoin transaction is actually pretty exactly the amount of money you pay as a fee times the cheapest you can get electricity in the world.

So if you pay $0.2 in fees, you will burn around $0.2 / ($0.1/kWh) = 2kWh of electricity. Note that this is an upper limit since it ignores miner profit (but that will tend towards zero over time).

This is ignoring the block subsidy, but that is independent of the number of transactions will forcibly solve itself over time.

Whether you (or anyone else) perform(s) the transaction or not, the same amount of energy is consumed, so I'm not sure how you got to that kind of reasoning.

Crying about the environment when talking about anything is ludicrous. Do you not poop? Do you not eat? Do you not consume in a modern society? Should we not play games anymore? Should we not watch movies? Find something else to cry about.

Except that the overwhelming majority of mining is done in China and the power is supplied by hydro.

Over half the electricity in China is generated with coal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China).

China's building new coal plants to met increased demand.

I would have given it my full time attention if I knew there was a $2M game like this around. That prize is crazy.

The chances of any one person winning that prize are quite slim.

There were only 180 or so registrations so the chances were quite good assuming people were of roughly equal skill and inclination.

The problem was deciding whether there really was the correct private key encoded in the picture.

I mean how do you ensure that this is not a wild goose chase?

It would be roughly analogous to an anonymous millionaire showing a pot of gold on TV (with respectable jewelers certifying that it really is gold) and then saying it will be buried somewhere in Arizona desert, here's the puzzle with the location.

(I believe there are some real life treasure hunts still ongoing based on the above premise)

In this case what stopped me from even trying were the discrepancy in the amounts. 0.1BTC and 0.2 BTC and 0.31BTC seemed like reasonable amounts and then the sudden jump to 310 BTC seemed unreal.

Yes the guy had the private key to 310BTC but was it in the picture? In fact, how do we know that 'Marc' is not someone affiliated with him/her?

> will be buried somewhere in Arizona desert, here's the puzzle with the location.

That's real - it's still out there.

https://www.pulselive.co.ke/bi/finance/finance-theres-a-fort...

> it will be buried somewhere in Arizona desert

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masquerade_(book) which then lead into the Hareraiser game which is unofficially the officially worse computer “game” to ever be created.

For more info about the affair in video form there is this talk from the Norwich Game Festival a few years back https://youtu.be/ouvi-fwrfIY

> It would be roughly analogous to an anonymous millionaire showing a pot of gold on TV (with respectable jewelers certifying that it really is gold) and then saying it will be buried somewhere in Arizona desert, here's the puzzle with the location.

Reminds me of the movie "Kumiko the Treasure Hunter" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3263614/

I suspect they're less slim than you're suggesting if you're a mathematically inclined person.

how do the odds of winning this compare to something like the lottery?

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