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How a PhD Student Unlocked 1 Bitcoin Hidden In DNA (vice.com)
dmoberhaus writes: A 26-year-old Belgian PhD student named Sander Wuytz recently solved a 3-year-old puzzle that had locked the private key to 1 Bitcoin in a strand of synthetic DNA. Motherboard spoke with the student about how they managed to crack the puzzle, just days before it was set to expire. From the report: "As detailed by Nick Goldman, a researcher at the European Bioinformatics Institute, in his pioneering Nature paper on DNA storage, to encode information into DNA you take a text or binary file and rewrite it in base-3 (so rather than just ones and zeroes, there are zeroes, ones, and twos). This is then used to encode the data in the building blocks of life, the four nucleobases cytosine, thymine, adenine and guanine. As Wuyts explained to me, coding the data as nucleobases depended upon which nucleobase came before. So, for instance, if the previous base was adenine and the next pieces of data is a 0, it is coded as cytosine. If the next piece of data is a 1, it's coded as guanine, and so on. After the data is encoded as synthetic DNA fragments, these fragments are used to identify and read the actual files stored in the DNA. In the case of the Bitcoin challenge, there were a total of nine files contained in the DNA fragments. The files were encrypted with a keystream, which is a random series of characters that is included with the actual plain text message to obfuscate its meaning. The keystream code had been provided by Goldman in a document explaining the competition.
After running the code, Wuyts was able to combine the DNA fragments in the correct order to form one long piece of DNA. After working out some technical kinks, Wuyts was able to convert the DNA sequence into plain text, revealing the private key and unlocking the bitcoin (as well as some artefacts, including a drawing of James Joyce and the logo for the European Bioinformatics Institute). He had cracked the puzzle just five days before it was set to expire."
After running the code, Wuyts was able to combine the DNA fragments in the correct order to form one long piece of DNA. After working out some technical kinks, Wuyts was able to convert the DNA sequence into plain text, revealing the private key and unlocking the bitcoin (as well as some artefacts, including a drawing of James Joyce and the logo for the European Bioinformatics Institute). He had cracked the puzzle just five days before it was set to expire."
if he would have worked faster, his 'prize' would have been $17k instead of 10k.. no.. 8k.. oh, wait.. 11k......
But was it stored as big data in the DNA-cloud as a service?
Picard received one section of the private key after the mysterious death of his old mentor - but he didn't know what it was at first, since they don't use money anymore in the 24th century. However they eventually figured out where more parts of the private key were, even though a Klingon captain and Tara King tried to interfere. Finally they got to the last planet, where the shapeshifter lady from DS9 gave a little holographic presentation.
#DeleteChrome
This type of story is about as Geeky / Nerdy / Technology based as it gets, and the modern day Slashdotter does nothing but talk it down.
Before this thread is done, we'll have Trump, Russians, guns, Hillary, luddites, a GD hosts file that can fix anything, things that go Moo, all sorts of slurs and a few homophobic topics to wade through.
I don't think it's Slashdot that has lost its way, but rather the clientele that frequent these parts nowadays.
You would think Slashdot was a subreddit by the way folks act around here anymore.
He hid a private key. A string of text. That's it. The story has nothing to do with cryptocurrency.
Who said it did?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
A bitcoin wallet consists of a private key and a public key. With the private key you can prove the wallet belongs to you and hence are able to start transactions.
The private key hidden in the DNA belongs to a wallet in which 1 bitcoin was deposited, as a reward for solving the puzzle. So with recovering the private key, this student can access the bitcoin.
I wondered that as well, but the choice seems deliberate. The PDF says a single "trit" is encoded as the difference between each nucleotide and the next in the sequence, explicitly to avoid sequences with repeated nucleotides. For any given nucleotide, there are only three possible non-repeating values. The PDF goes on to mention that every other segment is reverse-complemented, and that this choice of non-repeating was important in order to readily determine whether any particular segment had been reversed or not.
It's really base 3. One "trit" is encoded as the transition from each nucleotide to the next. With no repeats, there are only three possible choices for the next nucleotide in the sequence. The PDF goes on to mention that every other segment is reverse-complemented, and that this choice of non-repeating was also important in order to readily determine whether any particular segment had been reversed or not.