Join our Christmas riddle and win eternal glory (and a Dash present if you are the first to solve it)

Here’s how it works:

On each of the days December 1., 8., 15., 22. & 24., we will release a hint or clue to a little riddle to solve.

Each solution leads to one of the five fragments of a 3-of-5 Shamir Secret Sharing collection. This means, that once you have correctly solved/found 3 such fragments you can combine them to find the solution to the Christmas riddle.

Some of the tasks are easy, some are harder, but as soon as you solve 3, you are done!

The first person to find the solution gets a small monetary prize (we have buried some DASH – and you will uncover the private key for sweeping it up) and, much more importantly, the glory of being first! The next 19 DASHers to find the solution will get an honourable mention on our hall of fame (website!) and probably a Christmas beer…

So where are the clues going to be posted? First clue may be found in CrowdNode’s November transparency report so happy hunting. We wish you a merry Christmas and a DASH’y new year!

Clue #1 | 1. December 2018

First clue may be found in CrowdNode’s November transparency report, so happy hunting. 

Clue #2 | 8. December 2018

Posted in our Discord channel –  

Hohoho. Here is the second clue to the CrowdNode christmas riddle.
The second Shamir Secret Fragment is is AES encrypted and the ciphertext is: “soZMSXxhYBpQEnepTWqIXgCQ9spHQ7jWxIci/vxiKArX4GSmoV+0REoHtl2YyUIA” without the quotation marks. In order to decrypt it, you must solve the 2nd riddle:
What is the most commonly used Discord emoji that symbolizes a reward payment, used on the CrowdNode Discord by our first test user and loyal member @xianglo :upside_down: ? 
Use the answer to the riddle as to decrypt the above ciphertext using the online tool https://aesencryption.net/ (128 bit).

Clue #3 | 15. December 2018

Christmas is drawing closer and CrowdNode’s Christmas Riddle is moving from its warm-up to its serious phase ?

If you have been playing along, you might already have found the first 2 Shamir-fragments and you only need one more to solve the riddle and claim eternal glory (and a DASH :gift: if you are the very first to solve it). If you haven’t yet, you can still join the game!

Thus, we are excited today to publish the third riddle, which is quite a bit harder than the first two. If you are clever, you might solve it already today, but if it’s too hard, fear not. The fourth riddle is coming next Saturday… :santa: :santa: :santa:

Here goes the third riddle: With the release of 0.13 CrowdNode plans to implement a new security initiative to keep private keys even more safe.

In order to solve the question you need to:

  1. Based on the new masternode related features coming with DIP0003 we will no-longer break the private key for each collateral address into 3-of-4 Shamir fragments with one for each CrowdNode founder. Guess how we plan to break up and store private keys for masternode collateral in the future.
  2. Guess the three main advantages derived from the change.
  3. Write your answer in a direct message to our “Christmas-bot” aka. @Orloff5817. We will return a pm with the third shamir-fragment for the Christmas-riddle once we receive the correct answer. The answer to the question will be disclosed after Christmas, but in the mean time the SHA256 hash of it is: 817885b2657e08c9eb1935c85374752694a49466bd3a6b744dc69066f4b46f08

Extra clue:

Before giving out the fourth riddle later today, we would like to share a few more clues to our third riddle:

Many have guessed that changes related to using multisignature for the collateral addresses, however, this does not solve our problem. We will stick to using the Shamir fragments in another M-of-N ratio, you must guess which ratio and why. We are not solving any of the weaknesses using Shamir, however, we are leveraging its strengths. :blush:

The main problem we are aiming for is not related to hacker security… :thinking: From a technical point of view we could implement the change now, however, it would not make sense from a practical point of view – the change would simply be too inconvenient. The 0.13 version will eliminate the inconvenience to a high degree.

 

Riddle 5:

Christmas Eve is approaching in Denmark, the presents are under the Christmas tree waiting to be opened and the dinner is being prepared. ????

We would like to wish everybody a merry christmas and a happy new year. It has been an exciting year and we look forward to 2019 with version 0.13 around the corner and Evolution coming up.

Congratulations to @pasta who was the first to solve 3-of-5 shamir fragments, sweeping the private key and 1 Dash, but most importantly the first place, just ahead of Splawik.

You can still solve the riddle and become part of the hall-of-fame by posting the next address that the shamir fragments will bring ?

The last riddle to be solved is:

What was the latest masternode that was up and running one month ago? (November 24th) Find the link of the appropriate masternode on our landing page and get the last shamir fragment.

Practicalities:

For the Christmas fun, we are using Ian Coleman’s excellent collection of tools: https://iancoleman.io/ and the browser-based AES encrypter/decrypter https://aesencryption.net/
How to decrypt a Shamir fragment from a ciphertext and a riddle solution?
Some of the riddles lead to an encryption password which unlocks the Shamir fragment. Go to https://aesencryption.net/ and enter the encrypted text (ciphertext) in the first box and your riddle solution in the second box. Make sure the third box says “128 bit”. Then hit the “Decrypt” box.
How to recover the solution from 3 Shamir fragments?
Go to https://iancoleman.io/shamir39/ Scroll down to “Combine” and input your three fragments (aka “Shamir39 Shares”). Be sure that they are of the form “shamir39-p1 word1 word2 word3 word4 word5” without the quotation marks.
How to submit a solution (once you have 3 good Shamir fragments)?
NB: Please take care NOT to submit the output of the Shamir combiner anywhere!
You win by submitting a unique DASH address instead!
How to find that DASH address?
Easy: Go to https://iancoleman.io/bip39/ and type in the output of the Shamir combiner as the “BIP Mnemonic” and choose the “Coin” to be DASH (of course). Leave everything else unchanged. Scroll down to “Derived Addresses” where you’ll see a column of 20 DASH addresses, public keys and private keys – all derived from the Christmas riddle solution. To submit your answer (DASH address) go to our Discord channel and paste the first DASH address of the list of 20, which hasn’t already been submitted there by someone else.
Our hall of fame will be populated by the screennames of the first 20 clever DASHers to publish the first DASH addresses on the list. This is also the place for Christmas beer and perhaps glühwein /glögg! If you happen to be the first to submit a solution (the DASH address starting with Xqc12Y…) you might want to sweep the associated private key. :wink: