top of page

[EVENT] Puzzling

Updated: Aug 28, 2020

[EDIT] As of 8/28/2020, the puzzle has been solved by @MrAndrew#1302. Thanks to all who participated, I hope you enjoyed.


Well that's puzzling. I seem to have misplaced my Bananos. Can you help me get them back? https://nonograms.relaxpuzzles.com/nonogram/36187

Enjoyed Kron's banano puzzle last week? Here's a new puzzle inspired by that one. This is a nonogram. Logically determine which squares must be full and which must be empty based on the clues along the sides of the grid to reveal a picture. But you'll need your wits about you, for the picture won't help you all by itself. Good luck! Use $register puzzling in the #events-and-giveaways channel to be notified of possible hints or when the winner has collected their prize.



Prize wallet is here, so that you know if the prize has been collected yet or not:


Guide, added by request after puzzle has been solved

Step 1) Solve the nonogram. This requires logical deduction but is not particularly difficult. This will reveal a QR code, which you can scan for the wallet seed. Since QR codes have error correction, you do not need to get it perfect, only close.


Step 2) The name is Puzzling. In ASCII, these characters come out as 80, 117, 122, 122, 108, 105, 110, 103. Concatenate these (smoosh them all together) to get the index.


Step 3) Not quite done yet! There is a small problem; no wallet supports indexes this high. So, you need to hash your seed and index yourself to find the address expanded private key. Every seed-index pair is combined and hashed in this way, then an additional mathematical operation (a little more cryptography) is done to convert the private key into a public key. This public key, in a somewhat processed format, is your public banano address: Every single account has a private key like this. But if you do the hash yourself you can access far higher indexes than consumer wallets currently support. Blake2b is a series of mathematical operations that are done on the seed+index string to turn it into an expanded private key, but you don't need to worry about that; you can simply use an online tool to complete the hash for you.


Step 4) Still not quite done! Expanded private keys aren't supported in any current wallet either, though they used to be. So to actually retrieve the funds you need to make an API request to a banano node (there are publicly available ones so you don't need to run one yourself for this) to create a "wallet", add the private key, receive funds and then send the funds to your address of choice.


All done!


657 views2 comments
bottom of page