A friend of mine once downloaded something malicious to his Linux machine and wasn't worried about it. Then some time later, while browsing his files from a Windows machine, saw it and was like, "hey, what's this?" Oops.
He's a tech savvy guy, so I'm guessing the fact he had downloaded it himself really let his guard down.
Americans in general aren't following along on their own
This was also shown on election day when people googled "did Joe Biden drop out". Many voters had no idea Kamala Harris was even running for president.
Years ago, I used an extension called Tree Style Tab. It's better than just vertically displaying tabs. New tabs open as children, and you can collapse branches, so things stay organized when you have a ton of tabs.
An example I found: the string of digits 0123456789 occurs at position 17387594880. In this case, it took 11 digits to describe where to find a 10-digit number.
So I think such an algorithm would technically work, but your "start digit" would be so large it would use more data than just sending the raw file data. Not to mention the impossible amount of computing power needed.
What's a "pun'kin"?
I'm guessing it's a quantity of eggs, but Google isn't helping.