Bitcoin Forum

Am I correct that the best way to destroy bitcoins is to send them to the bitcoin address with value 0?

Public key: 16QaFeudRUt8NYy2yzjm3BMvG4xBbAsBFM

Privake Key (compressed): KwDiBf89QgGbjEhKnhXJuH7LrciVrZi3qYjgd9M7rFU73Nd2Mcv1
Private Key (uncompressed): 5HpHagT65TZzG1PH3CSu63k8DbpvD8s5ip4nEB3kEsreAbuatmU

Even with the private keys the bitcoins sent to this address cannot be spent as the keys don't fall in the allowed range (> 0).

Your 65000 BTC?  :o

Not sure on that one but:

1CounterpartyXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXUWLpVr

Should be a safe burn address. Looks like 2000+ BTC have been destroyed there.

Why would anyone want to burn Bitcoins?

As long as there is not private key possibility generated with the public key, the amount in the address is considered "burnt".

Like:
1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE

But it will be better to send them to charity:

Sean's Outpost: 1M72Sfpbz1BPpXFHz9m3CdqATR44Jvaydd
Wikileaks: 1HB5XMLmzFVj8ALj6mfBsbifRoD4miY36v

etc etc....

I know I can destroy the wallet, but I'm asking about the address with Value 0, is this address safe to destroy coins?

If I destroy the wallet there will still be a small small small chance that the address is brute forced or whatever (In 1000 years or something...) or a small small small chance that the wallet file is recovered somehow from the hard disk by someone.

As the value 0 address cannot be spent, I believe sending the coins to this address is even more impossible to crack than the impossibility of brute forcing my address.

Or no?

Counterparty used to distribute their own currency by matching the amount of coins that you burn in the address they created. This is called the "Proof of Burn"

Do they own the Priv Key?

guys I know there are some addresses that are labeled with "Burn Addresses" but I don't care about those as they can be brute forced eventually (whenever mankind is able to do so).

My question is specifically about the value 0 address.

Is it safe to burn coins with it or no?

I dont understand why to burn bitcoin at all why dont you sell them and left makes no sense destroy something with value this days are you insane or you wanna make some kind of revenge?Better then destroy is to donate to some people who needs them there is some organizations that accept bitcoins soo do the right thing.

Thank you, but I'm the one to decide what to do with my coins.

My question is still unanswered  :)

No because there may be another private key that corresponds to the same public key.

No.

If you want to destroy coins permanently, you should not sent them to 16QaFeudRUt8NYy2yzjm3BMvG4xBbAsBFM.

While I believe that bitcoins sent to that address would be "unspendable", they would continue to take up space in the UTXO set forever.

It would be MUCH better to send them to an OP_RETURN output.

OP_RETURN outputs can be removed from the UTXO set, and therefore do not put a permanent unnecessary burden on full nodes.

Thanks, but disregarding the space, it seems then in terms of safely destroying bitcoins the bitcoin address value 0 is the best way? I say this because in this way not even with the private keys you can spend the coins.

Only way I see of funds in the address 0 to be eventually spent is if the bitcoin protocol is changed to allow that particular address to be valid. Do you agree? (Again, disregarding the space...)

Alternatively, you could send them to one of my 'Bitcoin destruction' addresses (specifically designed to destroy Bitcoins). I swear you'll never see them again if you do that and the best part is that I provide this service for free :)
On a different note, the value 0 should do the trick too.

Why should we disregard space?  OP_RETURN is permanently unspendable.  It is "the best way".


No.  OP_RETURN is the best way.  OP_RETURN was created specifically for the exact purpose of being unspendable.


And with OP_RETURN there is no private key.  Therefore, you don't even have to think about private keys.  It is simply unspendable.


OP_RETURN doesn't even have an address.  It is simply an OP_RETURN output.  It is never spendable. The protocol won't be changed to make OP_RETURN spendable, because that would break all the OP_RETURN outputs that already exist in the blockchain.


No.


Why should we disregard the space?  OP_RETURN is better even disregarding space, but it ALSO has the added benefit of making it possible to remove the output from the UTXO.

There isn't really a good reason to burn bitcoins that I can think of, mostly this is done for experimental reasons I would think. But anyone bored of their coins and don't like having them can throw them at me as hard as they would like, the address is in the profile.

OP, If I may ask... Are you planning to burn some coins or are you merely asking because you want to gather more knowledge on the subject. Why would you worry... if the private key could be

brute forced in future? The chance of that happening is VERY slim and next to impossible. I hope you not planning to burn coins, because you got fed up with the technology. I would much rather

donate those coins to a good cause that might change other people's life forever... but that's just me.  ::)

Where do I get the OP_RETURN output?

Send them to me. 1J9qTM7kQTkQnhVabNz3Uy55eU63uow3sF

I will lose them trading and they will never be seen again.  ;D

The simplest way to destroy your bitcoin is to send them to 1PziLewwt2BwEhi2kxqh9oXXU8V6AvMHmF. You'll never see them again!!!

Seriously though, send them to https://blockexplorer.com/address/1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE (https://blockexplorer.com/address/1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE)

And they're gone.

You could just throw your bitcoins here: 1ThrowYourBitcoinsHere1741jy71wis

Did you know you can exchange your bitcoins to the "fiat currency" of your choice?

Send them to 1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa.

That's the address of the txOut of the Genesis block. 

If you send them there the only entity that could spend them is Satoshi Nakamoto. 

Satoshi, as far as we know, hasn't touched his coins except for <100BTC in test transactions.  And if he decides to spend it - he deserves it.

I know there are more certain ways, like the 1BitcoinEater address or an OP_RETURN with an input.  But I just plain like the idea of sending satoshis to Satoshi. 

Why cant you just let them lie in your wallet and forget them? Why would someone be hell bent to destroy something for any reasons when he can simply abondon them unattended

I was going to answer this question but noticed it was already answered up thread.

If you are hell bent on destroying Bitcoins do this:


So, no, don't send them to 1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE or 1ThrowYourBitcoinsHere1741jy71wis or 1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa or any other "Bitcoin eater" address. 

People want to do the strangest things.  I think some folks want to destroy bitcoin to make the remaining bitcoin more valuable because of increased scarcity.  Not sure if that makes sense.  Now there was a program that looked to burn shitcoins because there are way too many of them, and that I can definitely get behind.  But bitcoin?  It really makes no sense to me.

the only thing that i just wondering is, why do peoples destroy their bitcoin?? if you want to destroy your bitcoin just send it to my addy lol  :D :D
anyway if you want to destroy your bitcoin why not to donate it, there so many peoples out there that need the amount for buy some foods,

I do not think people wanting to trash their coins would care about that anyway.

But just for curiosity how can I do that?

Thank you!

OP already stated that he doesn't want to donate anything, he is the owner so he decides what to do with his money.
As user Danny said, the best way is to send it to the OP_Return

But how do I do that?

Why would anyone want to burn money?? What kind of freaking madness is that??

If anyone don't need money, please donate it to a charitable organisations who works for poor. This way you can make your unwanted bitcoin in good use.

Please don't destroy money in any form. It is a sin.

A sin? What sin is that..? Bitcoin has a limited supply and a capped amount... when these people burn coins, they effectively decrease the supply available and in theory this will bump up the price. So

this will be to your advantage. When people destroy fiat currency, it costs the government/tax payer money, because they have to replace it. Burning your dollars will not increase it's value, because

they simply print more out of thin air... BUT burning Bitcoin, increase the value of the remaining bitcoins.   ::)

Here's a sure fire way to destroy bitcoins instead of sending bitcoins to random addresses.

1) Create a paper wallet.
2) Save the public key somewhere so you have it accessible for anytime you want to "destroy" bitcoins
3) Cut the private key part from the paper and put it somewhere like a paper shredder, or just break it in small pieces and flush it down the toilet or something

That's all. Now you just send the bitcoin to the public address whenever you want to destroy bitcoins. All the bitcoins that are on that address will never be recovered because the private key was destroyed.

Destroying bitcoin is really nonsense at this time, its better you donate them to some social organization so that those bitcoin you like to burn can make some good impact in society. Buring altcoin to reduce supply only make sense on early days of launch.

While your method would send the Bitcoins to an address that would be "unspendable", they would continue to take up space in the UTXO set forever.

In other words every time you do that you create baggage that everyone has to carry around with them in the blockchain forever.

That is why, as discussed up thread many times, the preferred method of destroying Bitcoins would be OP_RETURN since those can be pruned from the blockchain and we are not stuck carrying them around in the blockchain forever.

Bitcoin is the future of success and we should have to respect it and have not to play with it and have not to destroy it. we have to support bitcoin, currently bitcoin is in a stage that it need our support and when we give it success it will also give us success in return, just stand with bitcoin to make it global currency.

If someone thinks that destroying part of the coins will make remaining coins more valuable the person is wrong IMO. In othter words you should destroy a large part, say more than 50% of all existing coins, to make others just slightly more valuable, but no one on Earth owns such a big part of them.

Are you sure about that. I do not think it is a good idea

Like Theymos?
www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4isxjr/petition_to_protect_satoshis_coins/d30we6f

I will never do that, I mean its uselses to burn your hard earned coins, even if the value doens't go high I will prefer not to waste my coins.

Why people interested on it? It's same as ignite a 100$ and than create topic about - "best way to destroy dollars". Bitcoin is so hard to earn,really.

This is a theoretical discussion of potential possibilities of permanent destruction of BTC.

I guess no one sane would never burn their own coins that way. I guess the only valid reason someone would want to do that is burn coins of someone as a form of attack.
If you cannot steal it - destroy it, or something like that.

But how do I do it? How do I get the OP_RETURN?

If you want to burn bitcoin , you can send them to online ventures which accepts bitcoin and can pay you in other means , other payments processors. I can tell them a few of them, and of course in return send me some btc to my profile btc addy  :P . Now joking apart, don't burn bitcoins, get some money from them, thats what is we love for bitcoin, it can be converted to real money and change someones life.

if you think about it, holding no matter what until bitcoin reach, let's say...1M it's equal to destroying them

i see no reason to destroy them just hold indefinitely

How do I do it?

If these coins are actually spendable, this question is pointless except for proof of concept. The question should be not how to burn coins, but why would one do so? When so many people have so little, why would one ever dream of "deleting" what could possibly feed or clothe someone in need?

This would be akin to burning ones house down as a proof of concept.

An OP_RETURN is simply another output for a Bitcoin TX (you can only have one per tx for a Standard tx).

Typically such an output has a zero value (as it is normally used to append some "data" to a tx) but there is no reason you can't give it a value (which would permanently "burn" that value).

Not sure if the raw tx commands enable you to do this easily or not though (but if the OP really wants to be able to do this then you could fairly simply modify my own raw tx stuff to do this).

Anyone who wants to burn their Bitcoins, can send them to: 1JainHFBinv3cCELLJW7scdxucu3hU9mgk

They'll never see it again.  ;D

But how do I do it? To send it to the value 0 addres is as simple as sending the coins to this address 16QaFeudRUt8NYy2yzjm3BMvG4xBbAsBFM but to send to the OP_RETURN what steps do I need to do exactly?

This is most likely not what you are wanting as a reply but using my code here: https://github.com/ciyam/ciyam/blob/master/src/crypto_keys.cpp#L808 you can see there is a "p_message" argument that is used to add an OP_RETURN output (with a zero amount) to a raw tx.

The code that actually adds the OP_RETURN to the tx is here: https://github.com/ciyam/ciyam/blob/master/src/crypto_keys.cpp#L945 and you'd need to change the "c_zero_amount" (so it would require coding changes to "burn" BTC as I didn't design my code to do that).

I have no idea whether the Bitcoin RPC makes this any easier to do so perhaps Danny can chime in if he has a simpler method (my guess is that no-one has probably made such a thing as it is not something that 99.999% of Bitcoin users would want to do).

There is no 'value zero' address. A secret key of zero results in a public key which cannot be represented at all.

The only way to destroy bitcoins in an absolutely sure manner is the OP_RETURN advice given.   Bitcoin Core provides no facility for this, because destroying coin is something most users would only ever do by mistake.  I'm sure that for a small percentage of that 65000 btc someone will happily implement it for you.

I've put together a very detailed 21 step process.  This assumes that you're starting without the Bitcoin Core wallet. It should be possible for anyone with high school level knowledge of maths and computers (converting between hexadecimal and decimal) to follow the steps.

---

For those that don't need so much detail, here's the
TL;DR:

• Step 1: Replace the "T" values with a little-endian hex representation of the txid from the transaction output you wish to destroy
• Step 2: Replace the "X" values with a little-endian hex representation of the vout from the transaction output you wish to destroy
• Step 3: Replace the "Z" values with a little-endian hex representation of the amount of satoshis you wish to destroy (remember to subtract the transaction fee)
• Step 4: Use signrawtransaction in Bitcoin Core with the result
• Step 5: Use sendrawtransaction in Bitcoin Core with the result of signrawtransaction

---

Now for the detailed process:

• Step 1:  Install Bitcoin Core version 12.1
• Step 2: Wait for blockchain synchronization to complete
• Step 3: Send the bitcoins to an address generated with the "Request Payment" button in the "Receive" tab of Bitcoin Core
• Step 4: Click the "Help" menu in Bitcoin Core.
• Step 5: Choose the "Debug Window" in the Help menu of Bitcoin Core
• Step 6: Choose the "Console" tab in the Debug Window of Bitcoin Core
• Step 7: Run the command "listunspent" in the Console of the Bitcoin Core Debug Window
• Step 8: Take note of the values next to "txid", "vout", and "amount" for the output that you wish to destroy
• Step 9: Convert the amount from BTC to Satoshis (i.e. multiply the "amount" by 100000000)
• Step 10: Subtract your intended transaction fee from the "amount" (I recommend 20000)
• Step 11: Convert the result to hexadecimal
• Step 12: Convert the hexadecimal value to little-endian byte order (example: if the amount was 05F5E100, then you would convert it to 00E1F505)
• Step 13: If you have less than 16 hexadecimal digits, then add enough zeros to the end of the number to have a total of 16 digits (example: 00E1F505 would become 00E1F50500000000)
• Step 14: Convert the txid to little-endian byte order (example: if the txid was 1234567890abcdef, then you would convert it to efcdab9078563412)
• Step 15: If you have less than 64 hexadecimal digits, then add enough zeros to the end of the number to have a total of 64 digits
• Step 16: Convert the vout to hexadecimal
• Step 17: If the resulting hexadecimal value is more than 2 digits, then convert the hexadecimal value to little-endian byte order (This step is unlikely)
• Step 18: If you have less than 8 hexadecimal digits, then add enough zeros to the end of the number to have a total of 8 digits
• Step 19: Modify the following raw transaction as indicated:

• Step 20: Run the command "signrawtransaction RawHexTransaction" (replacing the words RawHexTransaction) with the transaction you built in step 19
• Step 21: Take note of the output from the signrawtransaction command
• Step 22: Run the command "sendrawtransaction RawSignedHexTransaction" (replacing the words RawSignedHexTransaction with the output in step 21

If you really want a tool to do this easily (you type in an address that has some unspent outputs, and ALL of the outputs are destroyed with a transaction fee of 0.0002 BTC per KB) let me know.  I might put something together just for the practice.

I still dont believe there is someone willing to destroy bitcoins with children facing several problems are you fucking humans?Really are you with something called brain ?I hate this kind of question really and those who wanna to destroy bitcoins instead donate them has no heart .This thread is the same as ask how to suicide, return to the real world.

You did your job to promote your signature, well done. Now stfu and gtfo.

Wow this is more complex than what I was expecting :) will have a closure look at this later, thanks

Like gmaxwell said, permanently losing access to bitcoins is something that users typically only do by mistake.  There really isn't a demand for tools that make it easier to lose money. It wouldn't be very difficult to create such a tool, it just isn't something anyone has wanted to do before.

Then, please change the title to: "Best and easiest way to destroy bitcoins? Send them to the value 0 address?"

Conclusion: Just send them to one of the addresses below:
1ThrowYourBitcoinsHere1741jy71wis

1BitcoinNaCadeiaLLGEkw1ahccrF5V4q4

1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE

1111111111111111111114oLvT2

1LetUsDestroyBitcoinTogether398Nrg

If you developer people really cared about this, then they would make a tool to make that process easier.

From a Bitcoin destroyer's point of view this is just one more reason to send to a "valid address" instead.

You would know that we all know this is you had taken the 10 seconds to read just the one post at the end of the thread right before your post.  Please read at least one post in a thread before dumping your steaming pile of signature spam on the thread.

Anyone who wants to burn their Bitcoins, can send them to: 1GJJgmjh24LjUoxwMeNeX9c9BS71X4dN2n

Some 0.1 BTC or any value they pleased to dispose.  Hehe.

They'll never see it again.   ;D ;D ;D

Nice try mate...
Everyone can understand what you are doing here...
And this is not a way to destroy them, it is something like a blind donation...

Really, why to burn bitcoins when you have possibility to donate it and help people who really need it? On one adress posted above, 21 million usd bitcoin was burnt and seems most people sent some cents maybe to be indexed in transactions of that adress, why? When you can really do charity.
See this thread, this man really does amazing job with bitcoin, don't waste it, send him: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5139780.0