Cryptographs, revived.
May 09 21:36:20 thestringpuller mircea_popescu: how does one get gpg certified on your blog?
I had no idea what the gentleman might mean, originally, but then it turned out he was talking about the little 
displayed after the name of select people in the comments section. There's actually a number of different such insignia awarded to the esteemed Trilema commenter crowdi, and this particular one reflects the achievement of having resolved correctly no less than five cryptographs.
What the hell are those, right ?
Well, as you can see, there's this dedicated section called "Criptograme", which contains a number of images that you're invited to translate into wordsii. There's 92 of them, published between August 22th, 2009 and August 27th, 2012. Then they took a break, because I'm not sure even why, perhaps I was too busy or too lazy to do them in English, I can't even recall.
Anyway! It was a fun game, time to revive it. So here you go :
Sha-1 hash : 97c38890058b1d4ca20e99ca14a9778e24af7b57iii
———- The original article (in Romanian) introducing the things is Se dau insigne! There's a number of different ones. [↩]
- Romanian words, obviously, which probably makes them insanely difficult for you. [↩]
- This allows you to verify if your answer is correct without having to wait for me to confirm or deny, and also proves that there indeed is an answer, and that the answer is unique and fixed aforehand (ie, that I'm not drawing on a pool of possibles and rejecting them as people come up with them). All you have to do is run sha-1 on your favourite platform, of a string formed by adding your solution to "trilema". So if your proposed solution is "bitcoin", then you hash "trilemabitcoin".
Also, if you wish to prove you've resolved it without sharing the solution with the general public, simply make a comment such as salt+f0f0cf868277c9ff3873a7ebe68c3e2b49a7a14f. I will add the solution to the part before the + then hash the resulting string and check if the hash matches - if it does you're in. So for instance if the solution actually is "bitcoin", the hash of "saltbitcoin" will have to match f0f0cf868277c9ff3873a7ebe68c3e2b49a7a14f.
All these advances are the result of many years of practice in the Romanian space, isn't it neat ? [↩]
Monday, 12 May 2014
Updated because dignork.
Monday, 12 May 2014
Got it. Fourth try.
salt+17b47e5ac64b495428a081d8288d9cfd6c8d1c49
Monday, 12 May 2014
Nope, hash dun match.
Monday, 12 May 2014
salt+a66c1991dd3f13fc12238d88c80795d1e54631be
Posted it on #bitcoin-assets channel yesterday.
Monday, 12 May 2014
God damned!
For some background : originally the article was published a) with the proposition of using a straight hash of the solution and b) with the wrong hash published because I fucked up.
Within minutes dignork had identified the word I had hashed, which fortunately wasn't the actual solution, because I fucked up. So I tried to patch things by a) adding a salt and b) actually publishing the correct hash this time.
It took him all of a hanbover to break it again, and to quote, " and i still dunno how you derived this word from the pics, our cultural background is rather different i guess :)"
For these faits d'armes he receives the hallowed Technologist insignia, and the following question : got any suggestions as to what I need to do to make this hash business work as intended ? Thanks.
Monday, 12 May 2014
I make-a mistakey understanding how to post-a the answer.
If just posted the hash of the answer minus the salt. Obviously, I dun got confoosed.
Also, I figured that you might try a non-English spelling for the navigational element. French did the trick.
Monday, 12 May 2014
Salt should be long (128bits?), not revealed before end of play. Or use much much more expensive hash function (scrypt? PBLK... T2? that thing Stanis said is hard to pronounce.) 0.1 trys per second for high end CPU should be slow enough. I hope that MPEx is better thought out than this.
Monday, 12 May 2014
The reason I want salt revealed is so that people can test their wrong guesses without needing to interact with me (because in experience, people [understandably] hate having to wait for it).
MPEx uses PGP, not much in common.