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Comment by Dibby053 | Hacker News Reader

That must hurt. In case I crack the next puzzle... how should I go about collecting the prize without having to mine a block myself or trust a miner not to screw me over?

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To avoid this risk: either you solo mine your transaction, or you submit your transaction to a mining pool that will not broadcast it to the P2P network until it is mined. Some pools offer this as a service (eg. https://slipstream.mara.com/). This is kludgey but this is because the puzzle is inherently limited by its technical design.

Note that this issue doesn't exist with puzzle numbers that are multiple of 5, because these addresses have their public key already known. So everyone is on a level playing field. The multiple of 5 have been solved up to #125: https://privatekeys.pw/puzzles/bitcoin-puzzle-tx

There is also another puzzle for finding a sha256 collision, the address script just checks if the 2 inputs are different but have the same hash and if true it unlocks the coins.

That one is even easier to steal because it doesn't even require a digital signature and there are tons of bots out there inspecting live transactions and if they don't require a signature they just create a new transaction with an increased fee and their own address as recipient.

I didn't know there was a formal service for it, that's very cool. Still, it relies on the miner keeping its word instead of cracking the private key. In practice it would definitely not bother risking its reputation like that, but I wonder if there's way around it, with smart contracts or something.

I am not a bitcoiner, but I think there is a way to have transactions on bitcoin that are the hash of the script you want. So maybe you could submit the script hash and then submit the script in the next block? IDK if how that would work but I overheard some sort of hash-of-script functionality described by bitcoiners to save space. Hold on, let me see if I can find it.

Edit: nevermind, I got confused with P2SH: https://learnmeabitcoin.com/technical/script/p2sh/ pretty sure you can't unlock outputs with a hashed script unless the creator of those outputs did it ahead of time.

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