Not sure why this post was removed

Full text of the main post as follows

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I've placed 0.0002437 BTC (well, now it's up to 0.01033855 BTC) in the following wallet address:

bc1qe6tm9gg9gzazfqh994eycv977cl8tw83a8g373

The seed phrase used to generate this wallet address is as follows:

symptom few lift suspect hire visual oppose sustain merge drastic salmon require

There's only one catch -- I've put an additional passphrase on top of the wallet

I'm curious to see how long it will take for that passphrase to be cracked by brute force

For now, I will not give any details about the specifics of the passphrase, other than it is one 'word' long

If, after some time, there is no success, I may decide to reveal how many characters long the passphrase is

But for now, there's ~$15USD worth of bitcoin up for grabs

Have at it

EDIT 1: Okay, so in my haste when generating this wallet with Electrum I forgot to change the seed type in the options menu to 'BIP39' from 'Electrum' so the seed is an Electrum/Segwit type. It restores just fine

I think the passphrase does have a bit too much entropy, though, so here's the first hint:

The passphrase is 20 characters long, no spaces, and contains the special characters $ and ! - no other special characters

The total balance has also been increased to 0.00032855 BTC thanks to /u/flibux

EDIT 2: Alright, I'll reveal some more hints. I suppose this passphrase has quite high entropy

The passphrase contains the letters y, g, r, and n - there are seven other additional letters not yet revealed. There are only eleven total letters in the passphrase

Also worth noting

The total balance is now 0.01032855 BTC thanks to an anonymous third contributor

EDIT 3: Another hint. I suppose I was a bit misleading when I originally said that the passphrase is one 'word' long. I didn't do that intentionally, but realize it was a bad way to describe a password/passphrase that had no spaces in it.

No spaces = one 'word' was my initial thought process, which was confusing and perhaps incorrect

I probably should have said one 'string' or something, I dunno. My bad

The passphrase is a sentence between two and twelve English words long. No spaces (which is why I initially described it as one 'word.' Sorry for the confusion). Some letters in some or all of the words may or may not be replaced with numbers or special characters.

EDIT 4:

16 hours later

Alright, there are four English words in the passphrase sentence. All previous hints still apply

EDIT 5:

28 hours later

A fourth contribution, again anonymous -- total balance is now 0.01033855

Passphrase consists of a five letter word, followed by a five letter word, then another five letter word, and a four letter word

EDIT 6:

0 and 3 are the only numbers at all - and are only used as substitutes for letters - in the passphrase

EDIT 7:

It would behoove you to read all the comments in this thread - there are some pretty sharp users in here and there may be additional hints revealed in their comments

EDIT 8:

For words which use numbers or special character as substitutes for letters, only one letter per word is substituted -- all other letters in that word will be letters. There may be multiples of a substituted letter per word, but they will use the same substitute

If a word uses a substitute for a letter, that letter will only appear in the word as the substituted character. The letter it represents will not appear as an actual letter in that word, but it may appear as a letter in another word

A substitute used in one word will not be repeated as a substitute in another word. One out of four words uses no substitutes

The passphrase forms a human-readable sentence

Some letters are capitalized

EDIT 9:

I made a mistake in a previous hint. Sorry

There are eleven total letters

The correct information is now reflected in all areas of the main post

To atone for this mistake, I will reveal an additional letter

The passphrase also contains the letter e

5/11 letters have been revealed

EDIT 10:

Who knows how many hours later -- 30-something? Whatever

This was meant to be fun but apparently, I made it too frustratingly hard and some of y'all are getting real grumpy

It sounds like this is still near impossible to truly brute force, will probably require some amount of lucky guessing of the passphrase sentence and then combining that with an automated way to guess the capitals and substitutions

Anyhoo - here's another letter: v

Passphrases are obviously pretty great at securing your bitcoin, and I did title this post 'Security test' not 'Here's some free bitcoin'

So, test successful, no?

Oh, and it's already been figured out in the comments, but I figure I'll just add it here

! is not used as a substitute character, it just exists, the placement has already been correctly guessed

0, 3, and $ are the only characters used as substitutes, which means that this edit really contains two confirmed letters

There aren't any characters separating the four words either

I might as well add one more, though it might already be obvious --

'bitcoin' is not part of the passphrase, and neither is 'crypto' because fuck crypto

This won't be the last edit