Have you ever heard of the 310 BTC Bitcoin Challenge? In case you are a skilled cryptographer, you will definitely be interested in the challenge. Basically, someone named “Pip” has stashed 310 BTC (about $2 million USD) in a picture and you can find and take it.

The code for unlocking the four wallets in which the money was divided can only be discovered via a very careful investigation. While some prizes have been claimed already, at the moment you can still find some money and get yourself about half a million USD if you are up to the task.

This challenge’s concept is not new to the crypto space. Recently, Marguerite deCourcelle, a visual artist and blockchain developer has created a painting called The Legend of Satoshi Nakamoto. On the painting, someone could find $50,000 USD, which was very similar to the 310 BTC Bitcoin Challenge.

Some of these puzzles take years to solve, so they actually get very famous around the community. Pip’s 310 BTC Challenge debuted on October 2, so it is still very early if you want to try it. The developer decided to give the awards to “make someone happy” because he had a stash of Bitcoin for being an early adopter.

However, this time it looks like the challenge was easier (or people were more motivated because the prize is huge). At the moment, three of the four wallets have already been unlocked and emptied. Pip was very surprised that people were so fast and promised to increase the complexity of an upcoming project.

At the moment, hundreds of people are trying to discover the last wallet of the final wallet. Many public channels like Reddit, Discord and BitcoinTalk are posting techniques to find the remaining secrets in the image.

While most of the prize is gone by now, you can still give it a shot. For instance, in order to crack the code, you have to pay attention to the image and use image manipulation skills as well as text encoding and cryptography, so it is no easy task.

Steve Wilson, a cryptography expert at Constellation Research, has recently talked to Coindesk, and he also mentioned that another important skill is understanding the community. According to him, inside jokes and the culture might be the key to discovering some tips in the image without being mathematical.

Another useful skill, this one told by Pip himself, is steganography. Basically, the hidden message is on plain sight, so in order to crack the code, you have to pay attention to any detail of the image. Even the smallest details can be clues for discovering hints that will lead you to the objective.

To discover some secrets, people used literally all the information available on the page like the date reference of when the challenge was first started and even transformed the image to understand it better and get clues.

Another very important element of the puzzle is to understand the Bitcoin code and how it works. By knowing what is a wallet and a seed phrase, for instance, you can have important hints on what you are actually looking for. Because of this, to find the seed phrases, for instance, it would be important to know how long they can be in this case.

You may know, for instance, that Github repositories have multi-language lists from which the seed phrases of Bitcoin are created and this information could be vital to know what to look for in order to get the prize.

This way, to unlock the last BTC wallet, you will have to understand Bitcoin well or you will not have a chance to do it.

Computer programming and cryptography are also needed skills to crack a challenge like this one. Even though you will not need to program anything, knowing the code will help you to understand the logic behind the process. This way, you will be able to decode the image better.

Bit shifting, for instance, is a concept that was used for some people that cracked the code. Bit shifting is a binary value composed of ones and zeroes that will be shifted to the left or to the right and it works just like mathematics, except that it has its own logic. If you do not know this logic, though, it will not make any sense.

If you look at the original image, for instance, you can see that there is a hexadecimal grid with values that can be converted using a common shift key which will transform it in a whole new value different from the one that was originally presented by the challenge.

Finally, there is the cryptography, a very important technique for Bitcoin, which means that it would not make any sense to create a challenge like this without at least putting some emphasis on this.

People have used OpenSSL, an open source software for cryptography, to decipher part of the solutions in order to get the prize.

Because of all this, it is clear that you will need to use all this information to decipher the last code. If you are not an expert in some of these fields you will probably not be able to decipher the last code, so it is the time to learn if you do not want to lose your chance in the future.

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