Bitcoin Forum

One of the great things about BTC is the reversibility of transactions. If you lose your private key, then your BTC are essentially destroyed because there is no way to access them.

My question is whether there is a way to INTENTIONALLY destroy BTC so that other users can tell that the supply of BTC has decreased? I realize that you could always claim to have destroyed the private key. But my question is whether there is any conceivable means of proving that to be true.

You could have a paper wallet, and then burn it.

The problem would be that there is no guarantee you didn't back up the private key. Essentially, I want to know if there is some way to record in the block-chain that certain BTC are transferred somewhere that they can never be retrieved from.

Didn't btc-e publicly destroy a whole pile of litecoins? I think they were able to generate a valid but unspendable address or something.

Thanks for the tip. I am looking into how they did it.

Sure just send it to this address: 1111111111111111111114oLvT2

it's well understood that nobody has the private key for this.  It is the bitcoin address that corresponds to a public key hash of 0.

Ops, there are almost 3BTC there, seems that people are really destroying BTC's. ;-)

OP: Basically, you can just randomly generate a valid public bitcoin address (without the corresponding private key) and send the money there.

I understand now. Thanks for explaining! Well, that is easy to do! Yet another cool feature of BTC.

It was an interesting read, thank you

Yes, there are wasy.  But 99.9999% of the population dont have the means.

I guess an anonymous donation of 1,300 BTC into a fake account might stir up the market and cause a rally (due to decreased supply)  ;D

Well if you want to destroy them just send them to me. It's like trowing it into abyss.

Just note that it should also be an address like "1ThisisABitcoinEaterAddressjkjf8ejifnsin8w3" or "111111111111111idjfiufj3" (probably not valid) so that people can be sure (at least sure enough) that you don't have the private key. Of course you can "destroy" (render unusable) your BTC but to do it publicly as OP wanted to, others need to be sure they are untouchable, which will not happen if you just generate some address; it must be obvious that with a very high probability no one has the private key (nor will ever have).


Most certainly, everyone who has control over any amount of BTC can send them to for example 1111111111111111111114oLvT2 as Mike suggested. We should come up with a clever plan to get people to send their BTC there (of course knowing what they do!). Some kind of a "who's the richest" pissing contest type of thing but something with more appeal  :D

Imagine when 2,000 years from now, some alien civilization uses its advanced technology to reverse engineer all the private keys and take the BTC.  ;)

No because there is no way to publicly destroy a BTC irl.

You can, send it to 1ThisisABitcoinEaterAddressjkjf8ejifnsin8w3

It is unlikely someone has private key to this vanity Bitcoin address

2000 years! Quantum computers will probably exist before then, and this is the sort of problem they eat up. Then again, they've been fifty years away for the last fifty years...but we're really close I promise!

Come to think of it, the fear that quantum computers can find private keys ought to harm confidence in cryptocurrency once it becomes feasible that the government might be there already. It's totally going to happen, it's just a matter of time. I know cryptography for the purposes of secure communication will simply move to symmetric algorithms with quantum key distribution to preshare the key, but I wonder how cryptocurrency will adapt. RSA being broken sorta breaks their entire model.

If you want to really destroy bitcoins, you'll need to get some serious mining equipment (or convince others to join your bitcoin destroying mining pool).

Then, everytime you successfully mine a block, you can permanently remove from the bitcoin economy the block subsidy (currently 25 BTC) as well as all the transaction fees from all the transactions included in your block.

In this case, the bitcoins aren't stored at an address that everyone assumes has no known private key, they are actually eliminated from existence entirely.

Wait if it was done this way. He would just destroy his BTC. Wouldn't that mean that there would be just that same amount of BTC available for creating again?

I often hear about the quantum computer threat, but still I haven't heard about what exactly quantum computer could do with modern cryptographic. Is it really such a threat, and if it is, wouldn't it be a threat not only to Bitcoin but to all modern world (like password bruting etc)?

quantum computing?  that gives me an idea.  i'm almost wishing i'm not typing now, cause it might give someone teh idea

spawn 2^160 computers each computing a private key at a time.  done in 1 ms

Yes, you are right. The only problem is have enought reliable qbits in quantum computer linked together. As the qbits rise, the only defence is moving from Sha256 to Sha512 and higher before quantum computers with more qbits can be operated. I believe current experimental quantum computers use few qbits (4?), but for breaking Sha256 you need about 1000 qbits linked together long enought

Well it would be best if that started changing even now. The sooner the better. It is better to be two or three steps ahead the risk it all and regret once it happens.
Btw there are already quantum computers, they are used by military, NASA and google as far as I know. They do cost coupe of million at the moment but that price will go down and better ones will be available.

hammer your hdd?  ;)

Publicly destroy BTC?

How about mine for years then throw your HDD into the trash.

True story ;)

No.

If done this way it would permanently reduce the total amount of bitcoins represented in the blockchain.

If you lost your private key, or send bitcoins to an address where everyone is pretty certain the private key is unknown, then the bitcoins still exist. The unspent outputs can still be found in the blockchain.

Using the method I'm referring to above, the bitcoins vanish from existence.  The ouputs are spent, but the value isn't assigned to a new unspent output.  Doing so permanently reduces the total supply of unspent bitcoins.

I was wondering if we could just switch to a script atl coin for example or a new SHA algorithm or even a quantum computer proof algorithm to prevent this from happening?
Another thought : if we could use the quantum computers for mining before the government can do anything it would be great ;)

Could any of these bitcoin trash bin addresses be cracked? If bitcoins become worth millions of dollars I could see people wanting to spend long amounts of time on that.

Not by brute-forcing. Humankind will never have the kind of computing resources for that. Of course, someone might get lucky but that is about as probable as me winning the lottery twelve times in a row and then catching a deadly virus that wipes out the human population. Not sure about the exact probability of that happening, but it's similar. You would make more money standing outside and waiting for cash money to drop on your head from a friendly pilot.

There are already addresses with millions worth of BTC. I hope no one is seriously trying to brute force them right now...

@Bitcoinguru42 That's probable anyways people are already wanting to spend long amounts of time on that.

There is not reason for this, because it is hugely unprofitable when you consider cost and likelihood of finding the priv key to 100.000 BTC address.

:D

Maybe you didn't read my message quite well! I was hoping that just because I hope no one is that stupid/desperate. People really don't get probabilities so maybe there is someone.

Out of curiosity... Why would you want to destroy them?  And are you really trying to do it? Or just wondering if it could be done?  I have to admit, I'm curious now too, but I don't have money to burn.  I can see that if you destroy some it raises the value of the rest of them... but if you have fewer of them does it really help you? 

I'm kind of new to bitcoin, I think it's a brilliant concept.  I actually started looking into mining it about 3 years ago, but I get Cluster Headaches (imagine a day long migraine packed into 30 minutes to 2 hours, then repeat up to 10 times a day, or check clusterheadaches.com if you are curious.) and they ramped up about that time, when that happens I'm a basket case and can't really do much of anything, it hurts too much to think.  I even had a 5970 back then   :'(   Fast forward to now... I'm trying to get some mining equipment but I'm in debt up to my eyeballs because my insurance company screwed me over on a plumbing related flood to the tune of about $50k worth of stuff that was destroyed much of which I put on credit cards to replace then they refused to pay me back because I filled out a form incorrectly.  So umm.. if you just want to see something destroyed... you could send the bitcoins you don't want to me and I can send you some really nasty pictures of what water can do to your house and your stuff.  And um...  I don't recommend Travelers insurance... 

Korxax



1NtV1q29FtRAYAkMJHMYbASZLiLur2FQe

It will be always much more better just to mine instead

OK I think I figured out a way to publicly destroy it for you if you really must do it...  I'd still rather you donate it to my mining rig fund... but if you must do it...


Get a camera and film it.  Put the bitcoin you want to destroy in a wallet.  Hook up 2-3 keyboards up to the computer so they all work.  Put the keyboards on the floor in a small room, Set the cursor up so it's ready to encrypt the wallet...  Then throw a dog and cat in the room that don't like each other and watch them trample on the keyboards for a moment then open the door.  The wallet should now be haplessly scrambled with a long random passcode.  I suppose you could do the same thing by just getting multiple people to pound on the keyboards randomly... but the dog and cat idea is funnier, so long as they won't actually hurt eachother, chasing eachother around is fine.  As an alternate you could put a litter of playful puppies in the room... but they might pee on your keyboards.  If you do it I want the link to the youtube video!

If that gave you a laugh, please donate to my bitcoin mining machine fund.

1NtV1q29FtRAYAkMJHMYbASZLiLur2FQe

Korxax