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Chia Friends Puzzle findings

Scripts i use

I am using a few powershell scripts to query through the metadata and to render these HTML pages so see what it looks like.

Tools and Knowns in the community

Some Links to sites that collect things that are known:

Pretty sure we are talking about some sort of Playfair Cipher

New Attempts

My new attempts to find hints on the puzzle.....

These tips are from: scotopic - The race to solve the Chia Friends puzzle

  • There are 10K friends
    • 9998 are PNG
    • 2 are GIF (#880 and #9098)
  • https://www.bueno.art/ was used for assembling the collection
  • Seth has mentioned a few things that could be interesting (@jon/ChiaLinks.com) :
    • K32s and Timelords are best friends
    • Timelords should prompt a search/lookup on K32s
    • He didn’t have control over the minting order
    • you win a “coin” if you have the right “prove”
  • (2022-07-06) confirmed mint numbers do not matter
  • (2022-07-06) the unique chia designed NFTs aren’t part of the puzzle (the fact that they are unique)
  • (2022-07-06) Chia legal team shut down the idea of a mnemonic/prize
  • (2022-07-06) the solution to the puzzle is something Seth is hoping the community can use afterwards
  • (2022-07-06) no steganography involved
  • Seth provided clue(s):
  • (@jon/ChiaLinks.com): Timelords starting point -> K32 -> coin
  • There are 25 Timelord bodies with these symbols.
  • There are 1865 K32 bodies.
  • There are 26 Keywords with these symbols.
    • starts with each letter of the alphabet
    • not all BIP-39 words
  • (2022-07-06) There are 318 PNGs with transparent backgrounds.
  • (2022-07-06) @nezee - 5 NFTs have “XCH” tokens

This i have found in XCH Foundation Discord - chia-friends-puzzle Channel

Below my attempts to some parts

Something significant about 1854

There are 25 Timelords

There are 25 Timelords. They can be layed out 5 x 5 like Playfair Cipher

26 keywords

There are 26 keywords starting with each letter of the alphabet (A-Z)

I think this also has to do with Playfair Cipher

K32s and Timelords are best friends

K32s and Timelords are best friends. There are Timelords with a symbol on there body, and K32 with the same symbol as a coin above their head.

42 matching Coins for each Timelord

For Each Timelord there are 42 Chia Friends with a Coin matching the Timelords Symbol.

1865 K32 bodies

Hieroglyphs on K32 body images

Long time i wondered what this Hieroglyph metadata is. The Hieroglyphs are on the K32 Chia friends. They are a very small variation of background Color. But when you play around with brightness and contrast levels then they become clearly visible. These also thematically have to do with Playfair Cipher.

These are Hieroglyphs 1,2,3,4

The Numbers and hieroglyphs stay the same.

Hieroglyphs 1 Hieroglyphs 2 Hieroglyphs 3 Hieroglyphs 4
Hieroglyphs 1
Hieroglyphs 2
Hieroglyphs 3
Hieroglyphs 4

Transparent Backgrounds

There are 318 PNGs with transparent background (alpha channel in png). I rendered them with a checkerboard background to visualize it.

Hello can you read it?

@topper used all the keywords and a Playfair Chipher tool

OK basically he literally inserted all Keywords sorted by alphabet

AcornBirdsChinaDingoEdifyFixesGrazeHintsIndexJumboKingsLeafyMedalNicerOxideProveQuirkRemixSnowyTopazUsageViperWackyXraysYachtZebra

allKeywords

Timelords -> Keyword -> Coins

@jon in Discord

So i tried search Timelord -> Matching Coin -> Matching Keyword

i matched the Keyword by:

in a second attempt i ignored background so i matched by:

42 the answer to the universe and everything

Wrong attempts (possibly)

These are ideas i came up with, but are proven as wrong

Something significant in #1854

Seth Jenks posted on Twitter there is "something significant" on chia friend #1854.

There found an Alphabet in File 1854.png. When you look at this File with a Hex Editor at certain places it seems like every third Byte is a character of the alphabet. I wrote this powershell Script to analyze this.

[byte[]]$bytes=[System.IO.File]::ReadAllBytes("/home/rudi/chia_puzzle/all_files/1854.png")

$char=""
$start=341
Write-Host("Start at Byte: " + $start)
for($i=$start;$i -le ($bytes.Count -1) -and $char -ne "}";$i=$i+3){
    $char=[System.Text.Encoding]::ASCII.GetString($bytes[$i])
    Write-Host ($char) -NoNewline

    if($char -eq "}"){
        Write-Host("")
        Write-Host("End at Byte: " + $i)
    }
}

This Extracts out of 1854.png starting from Byte 341 (decimal) Ending at Byte 581 (decimal)

Start at Byte: 341
ABBCDEEFGGHHIIIJJKKLLMNOPQRRSTUUVVWXXXYZ[\\]^_``aabccdeefgghijjklmnopqrrsstuvxy{}
End at Byte: 581