In early 2015, Professor Nick Goldman of the European Bioinformatics Institute developed a new way to store digital information in DNA. During his speech at the World Economic Forum, he told those present about him, and then proposed to solve the puzzle: by distributing test tubes with DNA samples to those who wish, he asked them to decipher the information encoded in it. The winner was rewarded with one Bitcoin, and the deadline for solving the problem was set for January 21, 2018.
Belgian microbiologist Sander Wuyts only learned about Goldman's riddle in December 2017, but was able to solve the puzzle a week before the end of the competition. Graduate student Wuyts specializes in the study of the genome of bacteria and loves programming, but solving the problem turned out to be somewhat more difficult than previously thought. Despite the fact that decoding the DNA and discovering the hidden key only needed to have access to the sequencing machine and understand how the code works, the first attempt to obtain the encoded private key failed.
After the Christmas holidays, Wuyts and his colleagues and supervisor returned to the solution, having a good rest and rechecking the lines of code. As a result, the graduate student discovered a typo in one of the lines of the algorithm, which did not allow access to the encoded information.
In 2015, Bitcoin was worth about $ 200, but now its value has risen to 11 thousand dollars. The graduate student does not plan to become a crypto-investor, and he is going to sell his honestly earned Bitcoin.
By announcing an unusual competition, Nick Goldman wanted to draw the attention of scientists to the idea of using DNA as a universal repository of non-biological information, rightly believing that this topic could open up new perspectives for researchers and attract new specialists. The professor was right, the idea attracted attention - in the fall of last year, scientists wrote down malicious code in DNA that could infect computers during analysis.
Viacheslav Larionov