Bitcoin Forum

Out of all of Bitcoin history has one address been rendered a certifiable "Bitcoin Burn Address". An address the Bitcoin community can trust 100% that the Bitcoin sent to this address CANNOT ever be recovered . A Bitcoin address so completely unrecoverable the Bitcoin sent to this address could be considered "removed from total supply"

Here are two examples that are 100% burn addresses :

https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/1CounterpartyXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXUWLpVr
https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/1111111111111111111114olvt2

See here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5123840.msg50281418#msg50281418) for further explanation.

Thank you very much. And people would trust these addresses 100%? The bitcoins sent to this address can be considered out of circulation or removed from total supply?

Yes, no one has access to private key of these addresses.

Note that any private key can generate a bitcoin address. But you can't generate the private key from a bitcoin address.
Since these addresses have been generated without a private key, there is no way to derive their private key.

This is a knowledge not many people can know. This is like a Bitcoin burning address, no one can own or use it right?

It's not really a secret though, and yeah as explained above no one has the key to control them. Check the explanation for further details. A few minutes of reading and you'll understand it.

Yes because Bitcoin addresses are generated from private keys and public keys through one way elliptic curve multiplication or one way hash function using SHA-256 algorithm which cannot be reversed at all.You can make different types of Bitcoin address from private keys but you can't find any private key from any address.Here are illustration for @OP understanding

So if you don't have private keys or seed phrase for your wallets then you probably don't have access to funds to respective Bitcoin address which is the case with above two.So they are called burn btc address which cannot be recovered.

No, they can't. The above posts are not correct.

It is highly unlikely that anyone knows the private key to these addresses, since the addresses were obviously chosen because they represent a specific pattern. The chance of someone generating either of those addresses (or any specific address, for that matter) at random is around 1 in 2¹⁶⁰. However, those address do have a private key (actually many private keys) provided the associated public key is valid, but we are almost certain nobody knows what they are. However, to say that those bitcoins are permanently out of circulation is incorrect. Perhaps both elliptic curve multiplication and the hash functions RIPEMD-160 and SHA256 are broken in the future and someone can calculate the relevant public key and private key to those addresses. Incredibly unlikely, but we can't say for sure that it won't happen.

If you want to be able to provably burn bitcoin, then you should send them to an address which there is no possible way for them to be spent from. The easiest way to do this is by using OP_RETURN (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/OP_RETURN).

Thank you very much for your reply. Looking into OP_Return. We have prepared Bitcoin addresses without keys. This was a no brainer but we started thinking. That requires TRUST. It seemed fine at first but it would always be a matter for debate later one "is it burnt or isn't it" . We wanted an irrefutable method of removing Bitcoin from circulation. So here we are. Once again thank you for the recommendation.

Another advantage of OP_RETURN is that it does not create a permanent entry in the UTXO set. Sending to a burn address does.

I have always heard of altcoins burning address but not Bitcoin, I think right now it's not really necessary unless someone wants to steal it from you and you will leave no choice but to send it to those addresses instead of just giving it to them easily. Looks like this option can be used if we are running out of choice and of course no one really does that because before we come to this conclusion we still have so many options which include the mixers and other platforms to hide our bitcoins.

Yes they really do exist and some replies have already given an example of a burn address and to answer your concern about it being accessed, I think that the people who created this addresses have it in mind that no one, even them can't access it.

And there is the issue with such burn addresses. How do you prove you do not know the keys to these addresses? You can pick an address such as the ones given above where it is incredibly unlikely you have managed to find a private key which gives such an address, but you cannot prove that you 100% do not know the keys.

So the next question is, what exactly are you planning that requires bitcoin to be provably burnt? Most of the time people want to set up such an address it is to distribute an altcoin or a reward of some sort to people who have sent bitcoin to that address. The problem with using OP_RETURN for this kind of thing is two-fold. Firstly, it is far more complicated to perform than simply sending bitcoin to an address, many people will struggle to do it, and most wallets don't support it. Secondly, you need a way of verifying that that particular OP_RETURN transaction was one you were interested in, but this could easily be solved by requiring the participants to include a specific string in their OP_RETURN data.

So we are not accused of spamming we will reference our project we need OP RETURN for as “Alternative Chain Of Evolved Value” ACOEV.  We need users to be able to send Bitcoin to indisputably unrecoverable Bitcoin address or burn address. We have been calling these addresses “Annihilation Addresses” as a project specific reference for  ACOEV. Our initial plan was to use our own  Annihilation Addresses but these would always be in question. Would require trust that the keys where never saved. Lucius  brought some addresses to our attention that most could agree upon are considered a viable burn addresses 1CounterpartyXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXUWLpVr  and 1111111111111111111114olvt2 . You then mentioned “However, those address do have a private key (actually many private keys) provided the associated public key is valid, but we are almost certain nobody knows what they are” This  is concerning ..Will people question the foundation of our entire project because of some of the things you pointed out about these two commonly known as “Bitcoin burn address”.  

 Back to the utility of WHY. The function we are in pursuant of is pretty simple. A bitcoin user sends Bitcoin to an  Annihilation Addresses. If we are to use the above addresses We would simply use transaction details through explorer to verify the Bitcoin were in fact “Evolved’ or Burnt/ Removed officially from Bitcoin circulation in an undisputed manner. After checking all transaction details and making sure we are in chat or on the line with the specific user . Then we would issue the user  ACOEV at a ratio of 1 to 1.

 Your assessment of OP RETURN as having a learning curve or “struggle to do it, and most wallets don't support it “ as you put . These variable might rule it out as a viable solution for the utility we are looking for.

 Thank you very much for your time. It truly means a lot to have someone like yourself take the time out of your day to root out problems and provide solutions. Very rare in this day and age. People typically want to rant about “what wont work”
Or all the problems but never consider trying to offer a solution. Better yet try and solve them. Once again we are  grateful for your insight.

Edit:
A platform or tool to automate this task has been up in the air but cannot even start the work tell we have the definitive beyond question burn address. Doing it manually seems the most secure and might just be the best solution. Very labor intensive but the things worth doing are rarely easy.

No. The probability of anyone generating a private key that corresponds to those address is so astronomically small, which is the same as trying to break any other address given sufficiently random entropy. There is simply no reason for people to doubt whether you're generating an address that is in fact not intended to be a burn address.

Inclusion of OP_return is quite trivial, wallets like Electrum and Bitcoin Core all supports it. By parsing the blockchain for matching strings in the OP_return, you will be able to identify those which were burned for your purpose. That is not difficult and should be pursued if you don't want to contribute to blockchain bloat.

You might as well send it to any random address you can create (that has no activity).  That would be as safe as sending it to an "official" burn address.  Or you could send them to me and I will take them out of circulation. ;)

-For the private key breaking, there's always the possibility of brute-force trials like hashing & mining. Right now one of these addresses contains 78 million $ ( 76*10⁶ $), the other link is wrong, if a threshold is reached when the cost of breaking the key is less enough for the process to be profitable, it will certainly be done by someone (or even some country)
⟩»Or simply the one who originally published it knows the private key, I mean what can u do to him/her if claimed the money?
.
-I believe when u send some Btc out of circulation it is like u r giving them to the system of Bitcoin as whole; u add to scarcity of current trading volume & u give space for generating more as Satoshi has put a limit to total Btc ever.
.
-However, I also believe if u r doing this as a part of a deal to get another currency, the outside level of demand for this other currency will increase as well.

ranochigo , We can’t even begin to explain how much your insight  means to us. This feedback is priceless in terms of gaining full scope of the utility we are trying to accomplish. The fact you mentioned  "blockchain bloat" shows that you understand the specific issues that are important to us. Things some might say are trivial but stack up to something much bigger in the end.

The probability of anyone generating a private key to any specific address is astronomically small, and yet it happens thousands of times each day. Sure, you could create an address such as 1xACoEVxAnnihiLationAddressuH4xeM and everyone would be almost certain that no one knows the private key to that address, but coins sent to it are not provably burned. There exists a possibility, no matter how small, that someone either does know one of the private keys to that address, or the coins sent to it could be recovered in the future with major advances in computing.

If you want coins to be almost certainly burned, then an address such as the one I gave is fine. If you want coins to be provably burned, then you need to use OP_RETURN.

Trivial for you or me or OP maybe, but not trivial for the average bitcoin user who is storing their coins on a web wallet like blockchain.com or some closed source multi-coin wallet like Coinomi. Asking them to either recover their wallet via their seed phrase or export an individual private key and import either of these in to a new piece of software they are unfamiliar with, and then talking them through making a transaction with an OP_RETURN output is significantly more complicated than saying "Send some coins to this address".

Your insight on this matter is absolutely priceless and thank you again for your time. Your points about OP RETURN are well received. You are correct in the lacking easy of use variable to OP RETURN for some. We would not want anyone held back from participation due to them having less technical know how. The simplicity of the “ONE ADDRESS” concept would be very easy to keep accountability. With your vast knowledge and keen insight. If you had to choose one Bitcoin address to be used as a burn address.. What would it be? and why? Also taking into account our utility we are seeking. In all actuality for our utility and to establish the validity we are after most public Bitcoin Burn addresses should do. The biggest thing is people understand our project Devs and community leaders WONT ever have access to the Bitcoin that are evolved “Burnt”. Removing them from circulation is very important for more project specific reasoning's.Once again thank you for taking the time out of your day to share your insight.

If you are most concerned with people knowing that you or your team specifically do not have access to the coins in the address, as opposed to the coins being provably and permanently removed from circulation, then any obvious burn address would suffice. You can use a tool like this one (https://gobittest.appspot.com/ProofOfBurn) to create a burn address with a valid checksum, containing any initial string you desire. There is no difference between addresses like 11111... or 1CounterParty... which were quoted further up the thread, or the 1xACoEVx... I gave in my last post. All three are obviously burn addresses and all would have been similarly difficult (i.e. pretty much impossible) to generate a corresponding private key for.

Just did some thinking on this on got a trash but workable idea.

Write a open source code which generates a bitcoin address and deletes its private key.
Get it verified from open source developers and go live on some social media platform.
Then run the code so that you get the public address whose private key is deleted and there's no trace of it.

Announce the address as the burn address and send all the coins you want to burn to address.
Free promotion by going live as well getting the task done.  ;D

Thank you again for your insight. 1CounterpartyXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXUWLpVr seems to be the logical choice. It has a long history and if searched in a search engine. Any potential sender can follow the rabbit hole all the way down to the WHY this address is a burn address. Just searching this address can build a healthy understanding of how addresses are generated and their correlation to the blockchain. Creating a new burn address might leave some doubt in the minds of someone that does not completely understand the mechanics of a burn address.  Your insight has been priceless in coming to terms with the most logical solution for the utility we seek. Thank you again 

for a long time the private key '0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000'
 had lots of btc, but I notice now its gone, you used to not be able to use that address, so they patched the code enabled and somebody swept the address

so goes to show you that no address is beyond the power of dev-core to grab 'lost' or 'un-wanted' btc

This address is also a 'burn', as there is an hash160 of all zeros, or if there was it would take an infinite amount of time to find that hash that only contained zero's. Early on years of bitcoin, lots of people would accidentally send to this h160 address of all 'zeros' and it appears that they're still there. Of course people use formatted addresses to transfer and not actual hashes

ku 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000

input           : 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000
network         : Bitcoin mainnet
symbol          : BTC
hash160         : 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000
Bitcoin address : 1111111111111111111114oLvT2

Address
1111111111111111111114oLvT2
Format
BASE58 (P2PKH)
Transactions
95,576
Total Received
198.20607395 BTC
Total Sent
0.00000000 BTC
Final Balance
198.20607395 BTC

That private key is invalid, has no associated public key, and therefore has no associated address. What address are you looking at that you think has been swept?

Even if someone found a hash collision for this address (or any address, for that matter), the would only obtain that address's public key, and would still have to solve the ECDLP to find the private key.

This is a pretty interesting topic.
Even if such burn address exists,what's the point of using it?
This is like burning paper money in the fire.What's the point of destroying something that has value?
Making BTC even more scarce and valuable?I kinda get that,but do you think that some crypto whale would sacrifice billions worth of BTC,in order to limit the supply of BTC and boost the price.
This doesn't make any sense.
I'm wondering about which altcoins have such burn addresses?Many altcoins have a pretty big supply,so limiting their supply,by burning lots of coins might theoretically boost their price.

Your missing the point, that address for private key all zeros, used to be an invalid address, while 'ku' can't generate the address you can by using ecdsa algos yourself, I noticed last year that the address now had a zero balance, so somebody modified bitcoin internals to accept that addresss,

pk = k * G ( = zero )
y^2=x^3+7
secp256k1, [0,7]

There is a real value for the zero priv-key 'k', it can be calculated, but before last year the address had value, now its gone; so somebody inside of bitcoin-core-dev hacked the code to enable cashing out that address.

There is also the brainwallet key from the null-string "" that generated a non-usable address.

There used to be lots of funny addresses that couldn't be used, all seem to have been enabled in recent years.

Only one that remains & I dont' think anybody on earth has the priv-key to generate a public-key when hashed that is all zero's.

... here the sha256 (public-key) -> all zeros

now the only address that still has a balance is hash160 all zero bitcoin-address.

hash160         : 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000
Bitcoin address : 1111111111111111111114oLvT2

At 95k transactions it used to be a dust account, now at 198.2 btc, but nobody knows the 'private-key' for this puppy, so its a real burn address, as anything sent to this address is going to stay there forever

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterparty_(platform) is just one example to explain why people are burning coins. I quote, " Counterparty has a native currency, XCP, which was created during January 2014 by 'proof of burn', a unique alternative to a crowdsale or ICO, designed to maximize the project's legitimacy by eliminating any possible source of unfairness in the launch. "

So they use this to prove that they are "serious" about their project and from those burned coins they generated "Counterparty" tokens.

In the early days, some people "burnt" bitcoins, because they wanted to reduce the "Supply" of bitcoins and by doing that, supposedly increase it's value in the future. (Increased scarcity = higher value of remaining tokens)  ::)

No, you're missing the point. The zero consisted RIPEMD160 hash you mentioned isn't the same as a private key equal with zero. And it didn't just used to be an invalid address, it's still and always be invalid, because it's below the secp256k1 range limit. On the other hand, 1111111111111111111114oLvT2 is a valid one, because there may be private keys that can satisfy the conditions to return that 160-bit hash once their public keys are put through SHA256.

That's exactly what I thought, but then I remembered this thread:    
Best way to destroy bitcoins? Send them to the value 0 address? (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1466392.0)


I still haven't understood how he ended up to that address since there isn't a valid public key for private key = 0.

No matter how did that happen, the fact that the balance is now zero means someone has took that money (about 200 Btc) then probably exchanging them to USD played a role in changing the AMM price of Btc
(maybe the one who did it made the exchange at price 50,000$ making 1 billion dollars and dropping the price equation by that much)
Maybe it is just a test of whether it will be discovered or not before the big move of taking the ≥2000 Btc in the other address
.
-Another "optimistic" possibility is that someone at the Bitcoin core did so (just deleting not exchanging) to release 95,000 UTXOs and improve the system performance.

No one took that money, you can check it on a block explorer (https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/address/1111111111111111111114oLvT2) by yourself. Besides that, the post you quoted says itself that this address has never spent a satoshi.

You may have misunderstood what's Bitcoin Core. It isn't an actual Core where the whole chain of Bitcoin is built on. That being said, a developer of Bitcoin Core cannot delete UTXO by his/her own will. The whole system functionates decentralizedly and no one can remove a UTXO from a past block, because that would make the next ones, including that one, invalid.

The block chair link u added
https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/address/1111111111111111111114oLvT2
presents different values than the previous link from block chain
https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/1111111111111111111114olvt2
that gives an error
.
I think the person I took the quote from(probably a copy of what has disappeared from the blockchain site) says somewhere in one of the comments that he/she suspects something weird has happened.
.
In the link u presented, I find 1 confirmation added today.
-more than one, 8 in some, but all added today
.
For this particular address most r in OP_Return, ie no UTXOs. If there r, someone could add (with some TX fee cost ofcourse) a TX to accumulate all the burned ones into only one UTXO to reduce the live forever burden to only 1 for each address

It didn't, because a private key of zero cannot produce a public key or an address. It is invalid as per the standards of the secp256k1 curve that bitcoin uses. Again, can you tell us what address you are looking at here?

This is not how elliptic curve math works. The two valid y coordinates for x=0 for bitcoin public keys are as follows:


A SHA256 of an empty string produces the result e3b0c44298fc1c149afbf4c8996fb92427ae41e4649b934ca495991b7852b855, which when used as a private key gives the following completely valid and usable address - 1HZwkjkeaoZfTSaJxDw6aKkxp45agDiEzN

See this post from the thread you linked: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1466392.msg14828234#msg14828234