![]() ![]() As Wuyts explained to me, coding the data as nucleobases depended upon which nucleobase came before. This is then used to encode the data in the building blocks of life, the four nucleobases cytosine, thymine, adenine and guanine. Once he had sequenced the DNA sample that Goldman sent him, Wuyts had to crack the code that it contained.Īs detailed by Goldman in his pioneering Nature paper on DNA storage, to encode information into DNA you take a text or binary file and rewrite it in base-3 (so rather than just ones and zeroes, there are zeroes, ones, and twos). Wuyts already had a leg up in the competition: Not only was he studying computational microbiology at the University of Antwerp, he also had access to sophisticated tools for genome sequencing. ![]() Read More: A Popular Bitcoin Puzzle Has Revealed an Even Larger Mystery “I still remember myself announcing to all of my colleagues that we should drop everything we’re doing and start solving this challenge. “When I read the tweet, it goes without saying that I was extremely enthusiastic,” Wuyts wrote on his blog. The tweet caught the attention of Wuyts, who requested a DNA sample from Goldman and spent the last month working with his colleagues at school to crack the code. By last December, nobody had managed to claim the bitcoin so Goldman tweeted a reminder that the contest was about to close. Goldman set a three-year time limit on the challenge, which would’ve closed on Monday if nobody was able to crack the code. Now, that same bitcoin is worth over $10,000. ![]() The first person to sequence the DNA and decode the files would be able to claim the bitcoin, which was worth about $200 at the time. ![]()
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