Answers to Block Collider Evangelists Event #2
Block Collider Evangelists Event #2 was held on May 8th, 1:00PM EST. The event lasted for 43 minutes during which over 3000 people were active on the site, and 1950 subscribed to the hint channel https://www.t.me/readyblockone.
Two major changes occurred from Event #1 to Event #2.
- We created a dedicated tab in the web portal with a chat room where contestants could brainstorm and submit answers.
- We moved away from hiding a link and instead used a point system. Each question was worth a certain amount of points. The first 66 users who got to 15 points could become an Evangelist.
There were a total of 8 questions each accepting a one word or one entity answer. It was designed so that the question titles were not particularly helpful in answer and with the expectation that users after finding a potential answer would try all the questions like discovering what locks a newly found key might open.
Topics
The topic area covered in this event was targeted toward developers, people who reviewed the code base. The next Evangelist Event held June 16th, 7:00PM EST will focus more on content such as the white-paper, documentation, persons of interest, and posts.
Question Titles
- “Who is root?”
- “A data structure?”
- “Communication with technology?”
- “Outside friend?”
- “Who is not recycled and green?”
- “Not strictly typed”
- “A notable career event?”
- “The impossible question.”
Answers
See all the difficulty levels at https://www.blockcollider.org/evangelists. Note we take the difficulty score very seriously. The max is 10 the minimum is 1. The earliest hints have the highest difficulty. When we say for example Difficulty 9 it is almost the most difficult problem we will ever deploy in any Evangelist event. Solving a question at this difficulty requires a broad understanding of the crypto and technology space.
Hint 1, Difficulty 9, Supports BCE2
Hint 1 began as a Tweet. The part is bold is the hint.
“Evangelist Event II is in 1 day and 15 hours with a new home built into the portal. Be wary of venture funds out to rule the world even if made of dwarven metal. Hit login & without the first 2 you will find mathematics is the cat’s meow & the cat’s name. http://ow.ly/sy8k30jRriU”
The first part of this hint mentions a venture fund made of dwarven metal. This refers to “Mithril” the defense technology fund created by Peter Thiel and Ajay Royan. Thiel’s fondness for the Lord of the Rings universe has lead him to name several businesses after items in this category. Mithril Capital is named after a the dwarven metal “Mithril” which was gifted Frodo and known for its beauty, rarity, and impenetrable strength.
The second part of the hint “Hit login” refers to the Investor Login page on www.mithril.com. If you click “Investor Login” the URL changes to: https://services.sungarddx.com/LogIn//2316932
The last part of the hint “& without the first 2 you will find mathematics is the cat’s meow & the cat’s name.” is unique because 2 is referred to in it’s numeral form and not as a word. Since the only “math” on the page is found in the URL if you take the statement literally, it is the number 2316932 without the first “2” or “316932”.
Now the final part of the hint, the mathematics is the “cat’s meow & the cat’s name”. From this we can see the strange thing here is the focus on “cats”. In crypto there is only one application which which has gained significant notoriety by working with and build a market place for digital cats called “crypto kitties”. Each crypto kitty is not referred to by it’s name but by a number which represents the issuance number of the cat. In this case if you visit crypto kitty “316932”….
The answer for Hint 1 is “fix” or “FIX”. And solves the question “Outside friends”.
Hint 2A, Difficulty 8, Supports BCE2 + Olympia
The next hint is an audio recording which is narrated by Jas or “SpecR_Exposed2u”. The transcript of the audio the following.
Founded in 1954, the CERN laboratory, creator of the Large Hadron Collider sits astride the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva. It was one of Europe’s first joint ventures and now has 22 member states. When it was founded it was the largest shared scientific effort ever organized. Block Collider has a similar vision to break down barriers and bring together engineers and developers for the common good of the ecosystem and scientific exploration. Standards are required to work together which is why Block Collider used a modular design based on a shared data structure.
The most important part is the second section of this hint. The “standard”, “modular design”, “shared data structure” are all keywords of the protobuf message architecture which is a core component of Block Collider’s open source network node “BCNODE”. These are referenced in the root directory and you can explore them here: https://github.com/blockcollider/bcnode/tree/master/protos
Protobufs allows us to write common data structures which can then be validate and passed between implementations no matter what language the application is written in.
The second hint is in the supposed audio distortion found in the first 14 seconds of Jas’ narration. A few users were able to catch this, now that you know if you review the video (https://www.blockcollider.org/specrbce2) you will hear the obvious small “blip” sounds. These sounds are morse code. If you extract the audio and investigate its clear that it is not normal unstructured data but secret structured information.
Hidden Morse Code in Jas’ narration.
-.- .. — — -. — ……. … — . — — -…. — — . … — .. — -
The Morse Code when translated is “k i t t y [SPACE] 3 1 6 9 3 2” a second reference to the kitty hidden in Hint 1 and reference to the answer “fix”.
Hint 2B, Difficulty 8, Supports BCE2
The next hint also started as a Tweet.
16 hours before BCE2: http://ow.ly/dPYp30jSCN6 . Before Evangelist Events 2, 3, and Olympia we will release a Person’s of Interest section. A question will be derived from a major work experience of the individual. Dorsey may already know. 4E6E15AAC662A.
The link reference the Persons of Interest document which listed the individuals to review. The primary hint in this section is “Dorsey may already know. 4E6E15AAC662A.” Dorsey referring to on-off-again CEO of Twitter Jack Dorsey. If you went beyond the LinkedIn profiles provided on the prson of interest page you would have found Steven tweeted a anomalous plain hash several hours before the Person of Interest document was posted:
4E6E15AAC662A89DA55279FF40E5E1D576A19E6F8CD6074A56F7C42E40740700
The front of the hash matches the seemingly random string referened int eh hint.
4E6E15AAC662A89DA55279FF40E5E1D576A19E6F8CD6074A56F7C42E4
This would not have given you the answer directly. However if you visited Steven Chen’s company’s page CryptoParency.com they only list the most recent event which is also the answer.
The answer for Hint 2B is “Blockchain Career Fair” or “blockchaincarreerfair”. The solution for the question “A notable career event?”.
— — — — — — — — — — — — EVENT TWO BEGINS
Hint 3, Difficulty 8, Supports BCE2
The next hint is the opening hint after the questions have been revealed. It is a an alternative of the “fix” answer and Hint 1 + 2. Meaning you still arrive at the answer “fix” but find it following a different path.
Hint #3: Difficulty 8: Understanding Wall Street is more than a live data feed, its a commitment to the purposed and accepted value of an instrument and efficient connections to that value. If you police yourself and concatenate the signs you can find the domain of the solution. http://ow.ly/a6bX30jTlqB
The link at the bottom takes you to a live streaming camera of the Wall Street “Charging Bull” in downtown New York powered by EarthCam.
The FIX itself is used to interact with primary brokerages and exchanges in the traditional stock market which is why the them. You would have to have found this by studying the dependencies install while running a BCNODE or at the bottom of the technical white-paper.
The first important section of the hint is “ and efficient connections to that value.” This implies that the important tool for exchanging value is related to the connections made between parties attempting to exchange the perceived and purposed value of an instrument. This does not specifically mean FIX. The second section of the hint is relevant to the camera, “If you police yourself and concatenate the signs you can find the domain of the solution.” The police in the photo is in reference to the multiple prominent NYPD signs. There are four of them visible in the image.
If you concatenate the NYPD signs you get “nypdnypdnypdnypd” which according to the last part of the hint is the “domain” of the solution or “nypdnypdnypdnypd” + “.com”
If you navigate to www.nypdnypdnypdnypd.com you are greeted with:
This final part of the puzzle is meant to slow people who did not actually study/know what FIX is meaning they would immediately assume that the puzzle here based on the tradition of a Rubiks is to solve the cube (perhaps line the Evangelist logos up on one side). In reality, the puzzle had nothing to do with the Rubiks cube.
This assumption was validated by several users who reached out saying they couldn’t solve the Rubiks cube for the faces. However, if you had studied the underlying protocol and the role of FIX in the Collider and in Wall Street and the Bull you would know when you say the missing cube that the message was not meant as a verb but as the answer.
Which for several very acute users is exactly what happened. This problem and hint especially were very difficult.
The answer for Hint 3 is “fix” or “FIX”. And solves the question “Outside friends”.
Note the term Outside Friends comes from the simple premise that we have friends still working for mainstream Wall Street and FIX would make it easier for them to come into the crypto ecosystem.
Hint 4 + 5, Difficulty 7, Supports BCE2
This is one of the smallest hints because there are potentially thousands of possible solutions to the phrase unless in context of Hint 2 you realized the “standard data structure” is the one in reference you would immediately know the answer was “protobuf”.
Hint #4: Difficulty 7: The data structure is in the codebase.
The answer for Hint 4 is “protobuf” or “PROTOBUF”. And solves the question “A data structure?”.
We shortly released the lower difficulty version of Hint 4 as Hint 5 because we noticed “protobuf” had been shared on a syndicate channel and so we want the rest of the contestants to also rise to the same level. We are monitoring many channels very closely, cheating like this we take very seriously and with clear proof may lead to disqualification from participation in the final event Olympia.
Hint #5: Difficulty 6: The data structure was established by Google and is reussable across many languages.
Hint 6, Difficulty 6, Supports BCE2
This is the final hint connected to the crypto kitty hidden behind knowledge of the venture capital fund Mithril. This increases the importance of 31632 but does not mean anything specific unless you are aware of Crypto Kitties.
Hint #6: Difficulty 6: Outside friends can even be a cat. 316932.
Hint 7, Difficulty 5, Supports BCE2
This question is part of a new line of questions we are exploring called “Person of Interest”. Before the next couple of events we will post a list of important and but perhaps relatively unknown. The challenge is to learn the important events career wise in their life. One such event is chosen as the answer.
In our case we had the honor to meeting Steven Chen at a FBG event in Singapore. While everyone claims to be “passionate about the space” Steven actually puts his money where his mouth is running the community building efforts of projects we think are interesting (ICON!) and through his firm he started hosted the first dedicated Blockchain Career Fair.
The answer to Hint 7 for question “A notable career event?” is “Blockchain Carrier Fair” or “blockchaincarrerfair”.
PS: Rumor has it he maybe involved in a very big way in the future!
Hint 10, Difficulty 10, Supports BCE2
Hint 10 will always have a Difficulty 10 which is only used in the one “impossible question” assigned to each Evangelist Event. No answers to any “impossible question” of Difficulty 10 will be revealed. Winners of the question are receive almost immediately qualification as an Evangelist, receiving 66% of the necessary points to win if they answer this question. No users were able to determine the answer. The impossible question for BCE2 was:
Hint #10: Difficulty 10: Schnorr Signatures, anonymous wizards in IRC channels, a new compilation process is born.
To learn more about Evangelist Event 3 on June 16th, 7:00PM EST visit: https://blog.blockcollider.org/how-to-confirm-your-block-collider-genesis-registration-and-how-we-are-allocating-the-3efd10a3f737
Or join the hint channel: https://www.t.me/readyblockone
Congratulations again to the 66 new Evangelists, the entire process took 43 minutes, the first 20 minutes had only winners whatsoever. It required deep understanding of the underlying technology, intent, and even ecosystem experience/exposure of Block Collider. Welcome Evangelists!
PS: Two enormous announcements are coming for Block Collider Evangelist Event 3, however the game format and structure will remain the same.
