I'm 23 in Chile and a crypto puzzle obsession turned into a 59-experiment research program

I'm a computer science student from Temuco, Chile, and over the last months I've gotten pretty deeply obsessed with cryptography.

It started with public cryptographic puzzles, but eventually I stopped treating them as “find the password” problems and started building actual research infrastructure around them.

So far I've built things like:

• exact independent verifiers for solved cryptographic constructions
• a scientific ledger that preserves failed hypotheses instead of deleting them
• representation-search systems
• model-identifiability experiments
• tools for separating search failure from model failure
• a research interface for tracking the whole program

One of the stranger results was reducing 362,806 short transformation programs to 14,174 unique semantic classes by canonicalizing equivalent representations.

The full project is here:
https://github.com/benjacasas02/independent-cryptography-research

I'm trying to figure out whether work like this could become a real independent research path rather than just something I do obsessively on my own.

I'd especially love feedback from people doing Bitcoin security, cryptanalysis, reverse engineering or related research.