Bitcoin Forum

Say someone wanted to 'destroy' a sum of coins. He could for instance send them to the 1BitcoinEater address, basically no one would ever gain access to those coins(without the priv key), hence... he destroys that sum of coins.

Wouldn't sending those coins as a(possibly huge) fee be a better approach? That way, those coins get back to the miners and not sent into oblivion to a valid, but onowned, address.

That is also a good idea.
They could also simply donate it to charity, whether BTC directly or convert into USD first.
Then it's not a waste.

If you ever need to 'destroy' some coins you can send them to me :D

If you want to destroy, just send to this address :

1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa

https://blockchain.info/tr/address/1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa

If anyone wants to destroy coins. This wallet is available 1MYpNKj25HRBFpv22YpuZsuz2zZHKBLUu and will dispose of those coins  immediately(Bitcoins only)

by saying ..please

That wouldn't be destroyed.

There is no actual way of "destroying coins". Even sending to an address with a private key that isn't known, a person can also get a lot (and i mean a real lot) amount of hashpower to bruteforce the key. Although it would be difficult, the coins are still recoverable.

No they are not.

http://miguelmoreno.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/fYFBsqp.jpg

Coins can be mined out of existence (miner selects a reward less than the max allowed).

Still coins sent to addresses with no known private key are effectively lost.  No you can't brute force it with a lot of hashing power (not even all the computing power on the planet).  If you could then Bitcoin would be worthless.

Oh nice - I did not know that. Is the miner able to take "up to" the block reward? I was under the impressum the miner gets credited the reward and that was it.

As far as I know, you can perfectly try and bruteforce a bitcoin address. By simply using VanityGen. Your odds will be next to zero, but that DOES NOT mean it is impossible. Also, how do you know that in the near future there won't be asics capable of doing so?

See my post. It is also possible to be struck by lightning every minute for the next 14 Billion years. It's just so unlikely that you might say it is impossible.

D&T knows that ASICs won't be capable of doing so because, like everyone else who assures you of that, he has done the maths. There's nothing more to add to that (by now cliched, but for good reason) sun pic. When a non-zero probability becomes sufficiently small, it becomes foolish and obscurantist to continue to treat it as "0.0000001". What part of "made of something other than matter or occupying something other than space" is relevant to ASIC design? The argument presented in that sun pic is dependent ONLY upon very well tested deep laws of physics. Nobody is going to design an ASIC that breaks the laws of thermodynamics until some time well AFTER a theoretical physicist has shown those laws don't hold, which is a remote and non-quantifiable possibility.

Since we are all repeating what always is said in these threads, I'll add my 2 cents.

We have no promise that each possible outputs of our hashing algorithms are reachable by some valid input.  So, addresses where the private key has been lost are fundamentally different from addresses that never had a private key to begin with.  Thus, coins sent to the bitcoin eater are "more lost" than coins sent to bitomat depost addresses.

Physics won't let us iterate all possible private keys, but if we could, we are sure to find the bitomat coins.  We aren't sure at all that we'll find the bitcoin eater coins.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script#Provably_Unspendable.2FPrunable_Outputs

There is a way in the protocol to 'destroy' coins. By setting your scriptPubKey in your raw transaction to OP_RETURN then the people will never be able to create an acceptable transaction to redeem these funds.

I want to play too.

An even more guaranteed way to destroy coins:

Mine a block. Make sure the sum of fee and reward is less than the output of the coinbase tx.
 The difference is effectively destroyed.

Sending the coins as a large fee benefits one lucky miner; sending the coins to a "black hole" address benefits all the people who use Bitcoin, because by deflating the currency, the value of everyone's coin increases slightly.

"Bitcoin, we need to talk. It's not you, it's me. We need to take a break and see other people. Excuse me, I have a date with Litecoin."

Hi if that picture is true then can someone please she'd some light for example on why a stupid thing such as a remotely managed electric car battery charger is running SHA-1024? Thanks, btw they used to run SHA-256 before...

There is no SHA-1024.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-2

Want to effectively destroy your bitcoins?

• make a wallet with no backup copy
• store coins in it
• reformat disk

a bit extreme, :o i know.

Wikipedia is full of mistakes. I am sure there is SHA-1024 product coming out, the guy is making the hardware and applying for license...

Also, the strange thing is that Bitcoin was said to have started in 2009, but that page says SHA-2 was 2011ish...

All besides the point, point being why would anyone use SHA-512 then if SHA-256 is impossible to break in this time and space?

While, your overly used infographic is correct in saying that it would be impossible to check all of the keyspace, it doesn't necessarily mean it's impossible for someone to bruteforce a private key. It may be extremely and ridiculously unlikely but there is still the minutest chance that one can be found via bruteforcing. But for all intents and purposes that probability is so low that we just like to say its impossible because it sounds better.

The term is infeasible.  Then again just about anything which most people consider is impossible is simply low probability.   Trying running directly into a wall.  There is a non zero percent chance that due to quantum effect you will pass right through it.

Why to destroy ?

You aren't reading

"SHA-2 is a set of cryptographic hash functions (SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, SHA-512, SHA-512/224, SHA-512/256) designed by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and published in 2001"

Thanks, I was searching for it but I was coming up with a mental blank. I'm just really nitpicky about when people say something is completely impossible to do, when in fact there is just a ridiculously low probability (as to me there is a difference).

There are algorithms "stronger" than sha-256, not because sha-256 is brute-forceable, but because there is may be an undiscovered weakness.

no, not really. what deathandtaxes said still applies. it's computationally unfeasible to the point that it's hard to comprehend.

There is no 1024 bit version of SHA-2.  Either your friend is talking nonsense or you misunderstood him.  SHA-2 is no longer being developed.  SHA-3 is the intended replacement and it supports arbitrary hash sizes up to 512 bits. 


Not impossible to break, impossible to BRUTE FORCE.  Cryptanalysis may eventually weaken SHA-256 (and SHA-512) and performing a preimage attack may be faster than brute force.  Today no such flaws are known to exist for SHA-2 (all hash sizes) however the use of larger keys and hash sizes can be thought of as insurance.

There is no SHA-1024. And if there was, it would have been open source and not requiring any license whatsoever.

Because some day, someone smart may discover a mathematical weakness in SHA-256 and attacking it may become significantly more efficient than just brute forcing 2²⁵⁶ possibilities.

As for destroying coins, I'd say it's very likely (probability extremely close to 1) that there are valid addresses (i.e. correctly formatted) that are not the RIPEMD160(SHA256(..)) hash of any possible public key. Or only of apparent public keys (that is x,y coordinates) that actually do not correspond to any possible private key.

Sending coins to such addresses would most definitely destroy the coins forever. There is simply nothing to brute force, even if you had a quantum computer the size of the universe and infinite energy at your disposal.

However it's again infeasible to determine if a randomly generated address is actually such a 'phantom' address :)

I'm a lucky man.  My father, grandfather and great-grandfather were all hit by lightning, and I got born anyway.

I moved to a nice coastal area where lightning storms are less common, so as not to continue that tradition, btw.  I also don't fix barbed wire fences when storms are moving in, nor ride iron-shod horses across wet high-altitude flatland during a storm, nor....  well, whatever.

With luck like that, I might one day consider buying a lottery ticket. 

But I wouldn't attempt to brute-force a Bitcoin key.  That's just crazy.

Is it easier to destroy Litecoins?

Just as easy/hard. Litecoin is almost a complete clone of Bitcoin.

Would printing a paper wallet and then burning it work?

Why destroy bitcoins. So many newbies would be more tham grateful to recieve them, unless ur destroying them to create something else.

I know that none of the 50 coins generated in The Genesis Block can be spent, but what about other coins sent to that address? can they ever be spent?

The other "coins" sent to that address are spendable.  Bitcoin works on the concept of inputs and outputs.  The genesis block output is not part of the UXTO (initially as an oversight and now as backwards compatibility).  Each transaction to an address is a new output and in the case of the genesis block address those outputs are spendable (because they are part of the UXTO).

If you want to permanently destroy the coins, there's really no way other than sending it to an address that's guaranteed not to have a private key, such as 1BitcoinEater.
If you just don't want the coins anymore (why not?), donate them to the EFF or another organization that accepts Bitcoin.

Or you could read the thread and see there are multiple ways to destroy Bitcoins.

Starting from 0.9.0 transactions with a single OP_RETURN have become isStandard (so will be relayed). If you really need to destroy coins use those, as they are provably unspendable (unlike funny eater addresses) they do not burden the UTXO set forever.

wumpus: Are you going to implement better ways of coin destroying soon?

Maybe a BIPS should be written, how to correctly destroy coins.

I wouldn't call that destroying them. Yes, it causes there to be that many fewer bitcoins in existence, effectively accomplishing the same thing as destroying them, but if the address created by the miner has less than the current block reward, the coins never existed, and therefore weren't destroyed.

How do you get more provably unspendable than an address that can't be generated?

Imagine a miner mines a block full of transactions, and those transactions paid a total of 3.5 BTC in transaction fees.
Imagine that miner sets his block reward to 25 BTC (instead of 28.5 BTC).

Couldn't you say that the 25 BTC block subsidy was created, and that 3.5 BTC in fees were mined out of existence?

The coins did exist.  They were used as transaction fees.  They were destroyed.


How do you prove that an address can't be generated?

We really need provable coin destruction!

The outputs are created for the block reward. You are only technically correct because bitcoins themselves don't actually exist, ever. Ignoring the outputs does not mean they never existed anymore than ignoring some of the trolls makes them go away.

Honestly, this thread is pointless. bitcoins are not intended to be destroyed anymore than cash is made to be burned or any other store of value for that matter. If it's sacrifice you want to prove, there are other means. You could (though it's not recommended) create a brain wallet and shoot your brains out, for instance. I mean seriously, what is the point of this thread?

That's exactly what can be done with an OP_RETURN output.

There is provably no way to reclaim those coins, so they are provably destroyed.

Sure, it doesn't involve fire, explosions, or lasers which is a pity...

Thank you wumpus, you contribute alot.

You could still argue about whether they just took the block reward, or accepted the fees and created under 25 BTC.
If you accept 0BTC for a block (0 from fees and 0 from your reward of 25), then obviously yes, the coins used as fees cease to exist, but if they accept at least as much as the fees it's pointless to try to decide whether they were accepting from the fees or from the reward.

We really need more professional coin destruction tools or at least add destruction button in Bitcoin Core. So people can easy destroy there coins.

For further clarity, imagine the miner sets his block reward to 0 BTC.  Then there's no question that the fees have been destroyed.


Something to consider for Bitcoin Core 0.10.

Send the coin to the address which you created a moment ago, and drop the key, done!

That's not 'polite'.

Anyways the question in OP has already been answered.

Yes, I didn't hear a 'please' or 'thank you.'