Dear Phemex community,
I am Max, Phemex co-founder and the satoshi-maze puzzle designer.
Jack and I joined Morgan Stanley together 12 years ago. A few years later, I moved on to pursue my own business ventures, while Jack relocated to New York to continue his career at the company. I was first introduced to cryptocurrencies in 2015 when given a book from an investor. Bitcoin instantly caught my attention. In the following years, both Jack and I grew increasingly more confident that we could bring something new and special to the cryptocurrency industry by leveraging our traditional financial background. In 2019, we decided to join forces once again and started our own derivatives exchange.
Our dream is to build the “crypto version of the CME (Chicago Mercantile Exchange)”. We want to create a platform where anyone, anywhere in the world, can freely trade financial products using bitcoin. To achieve this dream, we have assembled a team of veterans from Wall Street and talented young professionals in an effort to complement experience with new perspectives. Currently, many leading exchanges suffer from lagging and latency issues. Customers are unable to trade and take advantage of opportunities or close positions that avoid losses while under high trading volumes. Phemex’s engineering team, however, is one of the best. We have introduced sophisticated solutions and built a truly modern crypto exchange over the last year. To prove our capacity and speed, we have prepared a demo in our testnet to be released soon. Along with this performance demo, we are also publishing a whitepaper presenting our core architecture. Phemex is the world’s first crypto exchange to share its core architecture in detail and to provide a demo in testnet. We have done these things to fulfil one of our core values of giving back to the community..
The team has been working hard to deliver and perfect a product that empowers everyone to efficiently manage risk and achieve financial freedom. In this regard, our goals are very much aligned with Satoshi Nakamoto’s, whom we celebrate in this artwork.
Through this puzzle, we also wish to pay hommage to all the people that approach life with resourcefulness and ingenuity. In our minds, you are the ones that make the crypto environment special. By simply publishing this riddle, we have witnessed thousands of people coming together and researching the basics of cryptos, learning encryption, writing code to hash, sharing ideas, and much more. Many users on our telegram group chat have been helping each other understand the key concepts of this new ecosystem. They have created a github repository in order to solve the problem together. The puzzle has now been seen by more than 300k people and the number is still rising fast.
Phemex believes that there is one simple characteristic that determines a good team: when all the best talents want to join you. We truly hope that the winner will accept to become a brand ambassador and collaborate with us to start a ‘Phemex Academy’ for new crypto users and traders.
Without further ado, here are some clarification and hints to help you solve the puzzle:
- The first 21-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e is: 957496696762772407663
- The private key you derive from Satoshi’s portrait is a big integer, not Wallet Import Format (WIF)
- The filename of the picture is irrelevant
- The next step involves converting some words from the portrait, without I/O, into a 27-digit number
- Go back to step 4) again if you can’t figure it out
It is possible that more than one person may find the private key at the same time. Whoever is the first to transfer out the 1.1 BTCs from this address: 1h8BNZkhsPiu6EKazP19WkGxDw3jHf9aT will be the winner. The winner must contact Phemex using a twitter account and provide evidence of controlling the destination wallet. The winner will get an additional 1 BTC trading bonus in a Phemex account. Anyone who has retweeted the winner before the transaction time will get a $100 trading bonus in a Phemex account. Please also note, for transparency, Phemex will need to reveal the winner’s name (or at least his/her twitter account). In the case the winner wishes to remain anonymous, then the first person to post the private key with @phemex_offical in twitter, will get 1 BTC trading bonus instead.
Please join us and enjoy the hunt
May the bitcoin be with you,
Max
