Bitcoin Forum

So, I've seen a number of really horrible ways people have use to "destroy" coins. First off, YOU DO NOT NEED TO SEND YOUR COINS TO ANYONE TO DESTROY THEM. You can destory coins without having to trust anyone

All you need to do is send the coins you wish to destroy to a special provably unspendable address. Specifically, I generated the addresses such that it would require you to generate a public key which when hashed in various ways hashes to 20 bytes of 0.. This is of course statistically impossible unless sha256 or ripemd160 has fatal flaws in it.

Anyway, I've generated a rather large list of addresses. You must generate the address for each different altcoin depending on the "version" of it's address. I include easy instructions on how to properly match up your coin to the proper burn address.

It was a lot of text, so I put it on my blog http://earlz.net/view/2014/10/22/0340/provably-spendable-altcoin-burn-addresses

Also see the PGP signed version here: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/Earlz/de3cc5f6ee85c7a69d53/raw/e9b8f53ddadd1677fc2fd2a0f1df8547e08ae408/gistfile1.txt

For reference to what it looks like on blockchain, you can look at the burned glowcoin transaction: http://cryptobe.com/tx/429d486e39921b0f5dce8b5905afeed4332605aad2d8a5beb244ab2bbb69479a

Also, if you like what I do and all that, donate to me at 1J5t3CW3PZd3YxJZDtuvkijAgHX1MrahiD ;)

If you need to destroy any bitcoins, you can burn them by sending them to this address: 1BtvMARTx98GNrbJTC1v3LpkC361XA1Zih
You don't need to trust me.

Just burn 31.7062663 BTC  Thank you! ;D
Txid: 7a96d955498b49487f3f46a0287817c9ae9202498db0506a67b7f661474feb1c

that can be very helpful.. but you are not explaining it easily, get a step by step way on how to get a made up address of lets say "cannabis coin".

It's pretty easy... Do what my instructions said, look in base58.h for PUBKEY_ADDRESS. you can see it is at line 275 (https://github.com/cannabiscoindev/cannabiscoin420/blob/master/src/base58.h#L275)

You can see it is


Now, go look up the version number on the post, and you see it is

This pollutes the UTXO with outputs that will always be monitored but never used (although actually possible if the hash is cracked or the universe explodes). For a truly unspendable transaction that can be trimmed by block chain compression and kept out of the UTXO set send a raw transaction with a script of OP_RETURN then the coins are gone for good.

Although that's slightly more complicated (read impossible) for the average user and likely irrelevant on an alt coin that'll die before the block chain reaches a worrisome size, but for an exchange or dev looking to destroy coins doing it right helps show competency and dedication to the coin.

interesting topic for sure !

and i am available to destroy coins too just send them to my Cryptsy trade key problem solved :)

Can you supply some more details on how to send a raw transaction with a script of OP_RETURN please?

"raw_scriptPubKey": "76a914000000000000000000000000000000000000000088ac", why this is a destroyed address?

I would hope that if this "spam" ever becomes a problem, it's /very/ easy to trim the UTXO set to not include sends to a publickeyhash of 0

Yea, the odds of it ever becoming a problem are very slim and as you say it can be cleaned up fairly easily should that case happen. It was just something to think about.