The numbers behind 10 years of Bitcoin Puzzle hunting.
50 of 83 puzzles were solved in 2015 alone — the easy ones. After that, each year brings fewer solves as difficulty doubles per bit.
Where in the search range were the 82 published solved keys found? Average: 51.4%. Puzzle #135 is excluded because its private key was not public at the last verified update. The distribution is roughly uniform — there's no "lucky zone."
Each puzzle doubles the search space. Puzzle 71 (lowest unsolved) has ~1.2×10²¹ keys. Puzzle 160 has ~7.2×10⁴⁷ — more than atoms in the solar system.
The gap between puzzle 70 (solved 2019) and puzzle 71 (unsolved) represents a 2× increase in difficulty. Puzzle 71 has 1.2×10²¹ keys — at 5 billion keys/sec, that's ~7,600 years for a single GPU.
The gap between puzzle 130 (solved) and 131 (unsolved) is even more stark. Without a known public key, brute force is physically impossible.
Puzzle #135 was spent in July 2026. The remaining known-public-key puzzles #140, #145, #150, #155, and #160 can use square-root interval algorithms instead of brute force.
For a bounded w-bit ticket, ideal SOTA v2 work is about 1.15 × 2^(w/2). Distinguished-point overhead raises effective K, and completing that budget is probabilistic.
2015: Puzzle N had 0.001 × N BTC. Puzzle 66: 0.066 BTC. Puzzle 160: 0.16 BTC.
2017: Funds from #161–256 moved to #53–160, increasing rewards ~10×.
2023: 872 BTC added. Puzzle 66: 6.6 BTC. Puzzle 160: 16 BTC. Total pool: ~1000 BTC.
Claimed: ~85.5 BTC across 83 solved puzzles, extending the prior approximate total with the #135 reward.
Remaining: 903 BTC across 77 unsolved puzzles in the static reward catalog.
Avg per solved: ~1.03 BTC (skewed by low-numbered puzzles and historical reward changes).
Avg per unsolved: ~11.7 BTC.