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Comment by semenko | Hacker News Reader

I'm not very familiar with the Bitcoin protocol: Can all users view the values of these two bitcoin accounts -- or BTC in transit?

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Yes, the transactions to and from these accounts are available here:

Stop release: https://blockchain.info/address/1HeF89wMjC48bWNgWvVo7Wu3RaLW...

Full release: https://blockchain.info/address/12AP6iCwRNFQqKLStH3A4b4hw3SL...

Those amounts that look like 8 bits of binary are interesting, but don't seem to convert to meaningful ascii.

That would have been fun.

It actually is ASCII data (byte == binary_btc_amount * 256), spelling the string 'http://i.imgur.com/5k6Rf.png.

This PNG image is a QR code, which decodes to the string '01101000011101000111010001110000001110100010111100101111011010010010111001101001 01101101011001110111010101110010001011100110001101101111011011010010111101101001' (newline added for layout, not actually present).

This, in turn, is a binary ASCII encoding of the string 'http://i.imgur.com/i. But that's a 404 page, so this whole thing seems a bit futile.

FWIW, the PNG file coincides exactly with the one generated by http://qrcode.kaywa.com/ for the binary string.

And the second Bitcoin account contains the ASCII string 'prove it', in forward chronological order. The imgur string was in backward order.

In the case of the "allow release" bitcoin account, clearly someone is sending a message to the perpetuators saying "prove that you actually have the documents".

In the case of the "stop release", a different person likely sent a message as a joke, but didn't realize that the QR code couldn't handle the number of bits for the full imgur url, and it was truncated as a result to the "/i".

You're absolutely right about the truncation, the text is exactly 160 characters long, and the QR code generator used silently truncates the clipboard contents, so that it's very likely that the person was unaware that some characters were missing.

Any volunteers for sending a Bitcoin message to tell these guys that they messed up? :-)

Apparently it's an imgur URL?

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