Invitation codeThe Puzzle is a volunteer computing project working on the Bitcoin puzzle. In 2015 someone sent bitcoin to a series of addresses whose private keys were picked from deliberately small ranges: the key for puzzle #1 is 1 bit long, #2 is 2 bits, and so on up to 160. The small ones were found long ago. Puzzle #71 is the lowest one still unsolved. Its key is somewhere between 270 and 271, and the address holds about 7.1 BTC.
There is no shortcut for this one, just checking keys one after another, and there are a lot of them (270 is about 1.2 sextillion). We split the range into blocks of 234 keys, roughly 17 billion each, and hand them out through BOINC. Your computer checks a block and sends back an encrypted result, which is verified before any credit is given.
Prize sharing. If the key turns up, the coins are split like this: 20% is set aside for taxes, 40% goes to the project operator and 40% goes to the volunteers. The volunteer part is divided between everyone who returned valid work, in proportion to their credit. It does not matter whose computer actually finds the key.
About the odds: the range is huge, and nobody can say how long it will take or whether we will get there first.
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