Bitcoin Forum

Last October a website called BTCBurns.cf identified 397 burn addresses containing 2,657.8686 BTC lost forever. It has gone offline. Since it stopped keeping track 26.04 additional bitcoins have been sent to these addresses.

The total number of unspendable bitcoins is now 2,771.4086.

http://bitcoinwhoswho.com/blog/2016/12/21/btc-burn-addresses/

2771BTC in total, that is a fortune but is this act intentional or a mistake, how can they be sending BTC continually to a dead address.

I think number of unspendable bitcoin is more than this because there are also lots of addresses which contain bitcoins and nobody have access to it, like addresses of wallets whose password were lost, known addresses of satoshi etc. However nice listing...

That's true, but there is no way to confirm that they are really lost, or that the people in question really haven't access to their coins anymore. That's why it's better to wait and not include them into compiled "lost coins" lists. I from time to time spend some hours on analyzing very old wallet addresses containing plenty of coins. In some cases you will see that after 5 or 6 years the person behind one of these addresses starts moving his coins. That's why I never take for granted that they lost access to their wallets.

People have burned coins in the past for different reasons, and they were not really worth alot in the early days, i can remember giving away coin i had mined as they were worth nothing and new people wanted some, but once they became worth something my attitude changed to how much i would give them,  i think this happened for alot of people, i have heard andreas and roger ver both saying that they had given away whole bitcoins, but now they only give away bits. 

it soes seem a shame for all these bitcoins to be lost forever, but hey on the bright side it makes our coins all the more pricey  ;D

This is not a small sum at all, what a pitty. The reasons could be very different but I wonder if there is any way at all to somehow save this coins or they are realy lost forever? Or if not now maybe sometimes in the future because this is truly big damage.

Yup thats right, its mostly because during 2009-2010 since the price was so low many people burned a lot of bitcoins. And as you said there surely are a lot more addresses that we don't know about, considering this 2771 BTC is a very less estimation.

It is very normal for bitcoins to be burned or lost in circulation. Even fiat currency like local coins that are always gone in circulation due to many reasons like melting it and used in jewelry by Chinese smugglers. This event are of no threat to the current users of bitcoin, it may possibly signal an intense increase in the value. Whatever the case the market will just adopt to the situation, but in the future if bitcoin reaches 100 million dollars each then bitcoin being burned is a very big problem that needs a solution.

In fact 2100 of them are burnt for Counterparty... However some of them (like bitcoins sent to address with lowest hash160 value) maybe just used for fun. These would be donations to everyone as if there is less BTC in existence, the price will go up as there's less supply...

That represent a very large number of bitcoins that I don't have in my possession. I don't know about burned address, but if someone buys bitcoins and store them in a cold storage and never touch for a couple of years.

Will the address be flagged a burned address?

What is a burn adress?I`ve never heard about this.

How is it possible people to continue to send bitcoins to those adresses?

I think they are not actually burned or gone .. they are just lose because of wrong sending bitcoin and forgot their own wallet password.. this is i think the problem that is why those bitcoin are gone that honestly in bitcoin i think we can not say that those are burned coin.. i think it is just a lost coins..

he is talking about a different kind of lost coins not coins that are not moved. there are in fact lots of bitcoins lost because of reasons such as forgetting an encryption password to a wallet or a lost wallet because of hardware failure, and generally things like that beyond recover.
there is actually a topic in this board about it where people comment on it with their lost coins. i myself had a brainwallet with 0.01BTCish which i forgot the password to :)

Its like talking about all crimes in USA beign counted as 550 while counting only in one state of 52 states of USA. In reality there is 45000 crimes total.
Same here, they counted below 3000 btc burned, in reality it could be over 1 000 000 BTC burned forever.
So not worth counting this way.

I think it is not burned, i think it was lost by users stupidity. But also how come people can send btc to a specified burn address. When in fact that address is already burned, the address is still active but not accessible? I'm a bit confused on what is really burned addresses. BTCBurn website got some concrete evidence that the address is really burned?

that is a good research. if so, then probably the owners of the addresses hold their bitcoin until some period of time. and then they will move the coins, probably they sell it. so in this case, we just need to wait for 5-6 years to know that the coins in the wallet are really lost or not yet.

They're really burnt, as generating a private key to any of those addresses will take up more time than it is from the beginning of universe, and spend more energy than the solar system (maybe even the galaxy?).

I have just read the article again and found there're misleading information. They said the block mined right after halving can't be spent, but output from block 210000 have spent here (https://blockchain.info/tx-index/12422902).

P.S. Why are there 13 BTC as fees in that block :P

Yes, it is too early to call an in active bitcoin address as lost because the holder of the private key for that address may be waiting for more time for the bitcoin to appreciate and then cash in some day when they are worth a fortune. Or may be they have forgot about it. Who knows! it will stay as a mystery.

I just found out about it, how many bitcoins of those users had been burned and how many they have right now if throw away so easy for them, that can't be come from one guy. Make some people jealous to see that waste of money, but as it stated from the beginning
"Lost coins only make everyone else’s coins worth slightly more. Think of it as a donation to everyone
I think that's why we get recently pump to the price, worth slightly more.

This is nothing when compared to those coins lost by James Howells in 2009. A few days after the Bitcoin mining kicked off, Howells tried the same with his personal computer, and was able to mine some BTC7,500. But back then, BTC was worth close to nothing. When his computer got damaged, he threw away the hard drive.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/27/hard-drive-bitcoin-landfill-site

I know exactly what he is talking about. Read this post again.


It could be anyone, but let's take Satoshi as an example as it gets mentioned here. Him not moving his coins doesn't mean that he has no access to his wallets/private keys anymore. It's very simple to just assume so since these coins haven't been moved, but there are good reasons for him and other early adopters not to touch their coins (yet). It's not just a few thousand $$ worth of Bitcoin that we are talking about. That's what I tried to point out.

The lost coins have nothing to do with a pump or I would say, a steady price rise and so the same thing can be said reversibly.
Such coins could have been used for anything including "donations" to an actual charity instead of being burnt, but they didn't.
Should they still be considered as used in a better way?

I somehow like it that bitcoins can be burned.
Because the total number of bitcoins is fixed, every burned bitcoin increases the worth of the rest of the bitcoins.
Maybe not now, but with time this is going to have a notable effect to the availability of bitcoin.

I am sure there are much more coins lost from the very early days. because bitcoin was like and experiment the first days it was released and before it hit the markets and was traded with actual money it had literary no value and when it was being actually traded with real money the value was still next to nothing.
that is why I say so many other nerds tried it for fun and uninstalled bitcoin and cleaned their computer afterwards.

The actual amount of "long lost bitcoins" is for sure way greater than the said amount. It's impossible to throw any kind of estimations as we simply can't know about most of it.


I agree. Doesn't seem logical that he wouldn't have control over those coins anymore. He simply hasn't moved them. It's not like he has an urgent need for even a small portion of the bitcoins ;)

It is not about forgetting your wallet password. If you remember your password again, the coins become usable again.
Burn addresses are valid addresses like 1CounterpartyXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXUWLpVr, to which nobody has the private key.

unspendable coins?
so is this like in the hacker movie where they skim off pennies off every bank transactions and accummlate millions of dollars this way?

Coinbuzz wrote an article about this, back in 2015. They made an estimate that around 1/3rd of all Bitcoins may be lost coins from addresses that haven't spent anything since 2011.
Of course, there's no way of knowing that these addresses are inaccessible, but that doesn't mean you can't make some reasonably accurate estimations.

Here's the article:
http://www.coinbuzz.com/2015/03/31/23-bitcoins-mined-13-may-lost/

On a side note: I'd like to know where they got their numbers from.

I sent 10 to what might as well be a burn address and i guess other fools like me also messed up not making back ups. There are 100,000s of unusable bitcoins. LOL.

Some lost from users but there is the expression Proof of Burn that is an alternate consensus of Proof of Work and Proof of Stake. More details has the following wiki https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_burn. Even more there is an archived post in reddit with a list of these addresses https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/3kqdjv/a_list_of_bitcoin_addresses_used_to_intentionally/. Someone above told that people intentionally had burned their coins when exchange rate to fiat was low but I have neither read nor listen anything about it yet. 

What if they were actually cold wallets? It doesn't matter though, there are probably hundreds of thousands or millions of Bitcoins gone. People who joined Bitcoin in the first year might have thrown away their PCs, or erased the data they had together with their offline Bitcoin wallet. There were many cases in which they later found out they had millions in their accounts after cleaning up the house.

Man, that smells like a lotta wastage fo such a tiny currency.   I git that tar's 21 mill gon' be produced, but i thank fo' the long term,  ya cain't waste that many...or the damn price is gon' hafta go up a lot t'accomodade all the people.   Rite? Anyways i don't know why anyone would want to boin they money.  Seem likka stupid thang t'do.

Some people just burn some of their Bitcoin to increase the value of it overall, and to be fair 2771BTC isn't a small amount and it is worth a huge amount.

As for everyone who thinks that the bitcoin really is lost forever, though, it's far from that. It'll take a long time to get to the address, but I would be willing to guarantee that someone will find it at some point. Assuming someone seriously undertakes that goal, though.

I don't understand why anybody would intentionally burn their bitcoin....It doesn't make a whole of sense to me.  Why don't they just put them in cold storage somewhere and forget about them?  I think that most of these "burn" claims are bologny....I know that awhile back there was a group who wanted to kill bitcoin by buying them all up and burning them....but that's just a stupid thought now days ---->  $934/BTC who could afford that loss?

It would be cool to be able to keep real track of the amount of burned addresses, but only those addresses that are publicly know to be as burning address can provide us efficient data in keeping track of real lost forever bitcoins.

if we take into consideration that the address of satoshi nakamoto contain up to 1 million bitcoins, we may think that the amount of burned BTC is over 1 million now, since its safe to assume satoshis keys are lost for life.

I should have been more clear; 2,771.4086 is the absolute minimum unspendable bitcoins in existence. There are certainly more.

some people believe satoshi mined 1-1.5 Million BTC
i have seen analyists thinking that 33% of the bitcoins maybe "lost" but i guessitwill take some decades to see if that is true
it is wrong in my opinion to think if someone didnt sell for $1250  then his coins must be must
many investors are likely fiat rich and dont need to cash out until something drastic happens in the economy

I guess it's a bit more to add to this thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=7253.0)... Still don't understand why people burn their coins intentionally. I don't think any burning is purposeful... But to each his own.

lookup "proof of burn"
this is the only purposeful burning i am aware of

the rest of lost coins maybe someday  retrievable when computers are powerful enough to break their passphrases

A burn address is an address that is created for people to send Bitcoins to them and make sure that it is unable to be used. The address does not have a private key that is known to anyone. An example of an address is this: 1CounterpartyXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXUWLpVr. It is extremely hard for anyone to generate an address that starts with 1CounterpartyXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX and thus the probability of it having a private key that is known to everyone is extremely low. Many motivations to doing this.
And when someone does it we should IMMEDIATELY switch to a different algorithm of generating wallet. Your "very long" is underestimating what power it is to crack an address. When you get that address, the earth probably wouldn't even exist.

They aren't meant to be taken out. If anyone ever gets access to them, we should be fearing for our addresses to be cracked. This is impossible and if it does happen, we would have switched to a better algorithm to generating addresses.

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Sending Bitcoins intentionally to an address that cannot be spent is irresponsible since it introduces blockchain spent as the UXTO of them will be stored forever. A better method would be to use OP_Return since they do not occupy any space in the node's UXTO.

That’s really painful part that we are destroying bitcoins. I always believed that there are some better ways to avoid processes like proof of burn. Even if such activities are increasing the values of remaining bitcoins, I don’t think that it is a wise idea to use it. Bitcoin is in initial phase and we shouldn't do something that might affect the future such as destruction.

For sure that those bitcoins are lost forever. I'm a bit curious why another 26.04 BTC will be sent to those addresses, what a burner wasting big amount of money.

2,771.4086BTC is already a big amount of bitcoin but I guess if someone is keep on sending on those addresses, it has something to do with pump.

So that the total supply of bitcoin is going to be lesser.

My big question is how do they know that this is a burning address ? Unless this is stated in the address' public key, I see absolutely no way to identificate them. Anyone has a clue about that ? And beside that, I think that the amount is much bigger that the 2771,4086BTC stated in the second post.

Supply would be really lesser but 2k bitcoins wouldn't hurt soo much on bitcoins ecosystem but the painful part is that those bitcoin aren't useful already unless if they are being used by the site owner or the person who have access on those funds but if none then those will float only on bitcoin network and cant be spend.Supply would really be lesser and that amount of 26 btc maybe from a user that didn't know that the site goes offline and its really a sad thing because 26 btc is already a lot of money.

As if we know that there are not only 2k bitcoins are just being burned and totally lost forever and that is has a very big impact in the ecosystem.

And I don't think that those online wallet site owners have the rights to use it unless they will have sometime for restoring those burned coins forever.

Yes it is sad because even though that isn't our bitcoins but still it worth a lot.

Since the total number of Bitcoins that can be mined is limited, I have a feeling that these "lost" bitcoins will cause a deflationary effect in the long run. Why can't we destroy these coins and re-generate them from mining?

New Burn address tryIT!!!

1NextXE5aM81RejwHbCg3SpwaCstYWUgcm

I lost its pvtkey