Collision Protocol: 1000 BTC Challenge Pool (#135, 13.5 BTC)

Quick background if you have not run into it: the 1000 BTC Challenge is an on-chain puzzle from 2015. Someone funded 160 addresses whose private keys sit in deliberately increasing ranges (key N is between 2^N-1 and 2^N), and in 2023 the prizes were bumped 10x. The low ones have been picked off over the years; the unsolved ones still hold real coins. #135 is the current target and holds 13.5 BTC. Tracker: https://privatekeys.pw/puzzles/bitcoin-puzzle-tx

Collision Protocol is a distributed Pollard's Kangaroo pool that points a fleet of GPUs at one unsolved key at a time. It's on #135 right now and stays on it until it's solved. When that happens the pool doesn't stop: it automatically rolls the whole fleet to the next key most likely to fall (the lowest unsolved range whose public key is exposed, which is what Kangaroo needs). Nothing for you to reconfigure, your worker just follows the pool.

Each worker only runs one side of the walk, tame or wild, and sends its distinguished points (DPs) to the server. That split is the anti-cheat: no single machine ever has both halves, so nobody can quietly hit the collision, recover the key, and sweep the coins before the pool does. The upside for you is the payout. Since the solve can only land at the pool, every DP you commit counts toward your share. If the pool cracks the key, the prize is split by contribution: a 5% pool fee, and everything left over distributed in proportion to the verified DPs each worker submitted.

Rough scale: RCKangaroo's own estimate for a 2¹³⁴ range is 1.15 * 2⁶⁷ operations, which at dp_bits 28 is about 6 * 10¹¹ DPs to expect a solve. That is an expectation: a real solve can land anywhere from about half to double that, and DP/GPU overhead pushes the true count up somewhat. Expected time against the pool's aggregate rate:

 pool DP/s expected solve time, #135 100 ~200 years 1,000 ~20 years 10,000 ~2 years 100,000 ~2.5 months 1,000,000 ~7 days 

We are at single digits per second today on a couple of test rigs, and the bottom rows of that table are a serious amount of hardware, so this is mostly a question of how many GPUs show up. Rate scales linearly with workers.

Open to testers who get that it's early and rough in places, and who will open a GitHub issue when something breaks instead of just walking away. Mainly after Linux and Apple Silicon right now.

• Client (collider) is open, GPLv3, built on JeanLucPons' RCKangaroo: https://github.com/hevnsnt/collider
• Issues: https://github.com/hevnsnt/collider/issues
• Live coverage/stats: https://collisionprotocol.com/pool

collider --pool pool.collisionprotocol.com:17403 --worker <btc-payout-address>

Worker name is the payout address (So get it right!). The pool tells the client which target, range, and DP size to work, so the same client follows whatever key is active. CUDA on Win/Linux, Metal on Apple Silicon, CPU fallback.

What's useful to report: whether it builds and runs on your platform, the rates you get, and anything that breaks or drops the connection. Source is there if you want to pull it apart.

collider-pro is a separate paid build for solo and brainwallet work. Not needed for the pool.