it is not just P2SH outputs, you can always create any script in your scriptpub that would eventually fail during evaluation and sending coins to such outputs would be lost forever. redeem scripts just have an additional step and P2SH would always be standard unlike the non-standard scriptpubs.

i created a topic a while ago about provably unspendable UTXOs which you may find interesting (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5238872.0). you can wrap any of those scripts like the one with OP_IF but no OP_ENDIF in a redeem script and then create is corresponding address. this script will always fail to evaluate. it doesn't even have to have a private key involved a simple lone OP_IF would suffice to fail in this case.

yes but a simple OP_RETURN would do just fine.

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EDIT: the single OP_IF seems to have already been used (in 2014):
3MpTk145zbm5odhRALfT9BnUs8DB5w4ydw

part of the problem is the market itself and it is not just newbies who do such desperate acts it is many others too with experience in trading. the problem is that the altcoin market is manipulated so much so that it is mainly pump and dumps. as a result when someone enters this market and tries making profit they end up losing money to all the dumps, then they get so desperate to make their lost money back that they seek advice and end up in the scammers traps who end up selling them garbage and call it "signal".

if we eliminate manipulation, shitcoins and pump and dumps then slowly people can learn trading instead of learning how pump and dumps work and then start making real profit without feeling the need for a "signal" group. eventually the scammers also disappear.

"burning" coins nowadays is done through using output scripts that can not be spent by consensus rules. that means using OP_RETURN to provably and undoubtedly burn coins. to spend these outputs, it requires a major protocol change that nobody will ever agree with.

the other way of "burning" coins is what others pointed out which is by sending to an address that was created from a base58 instead of using a private key. it means you write any string using base58 characters  then add its checksum.
what you read might have been about this. if some day 160-bit collision in HASH160 became possible and ECDSA were broken then it could become possible to spend these outputs BUT here is the problem: long before something like that happens bitcoin will have had switched algorithm for both of its cryptography functions so realistically it will never be possible.

it is just that time of the year again when bitcoin market gets weird since the price doesn't go either up or down so everyone starts bringing out their crap machines and create all kinds of weird-ass statements about bitcoin.
in fact if you check the timing of this types of articles with the price movements you can see they are all focused on times like this!

lol. someone should really tell these idiots that they shouldn't talk about the market that they have no understanding of.
a very quick look at 2017 shows that the worst time and biggest "stress tests" were happening in that year. what they refer to as "mining cost" is nothing in comparison! we had the civil war and the chain split scares, we had the spam attacks by many attackers, we had the real world attacks from including but not limited to JPMorgan itself, and a lot more. with all that bitcoin thrived and set a new ATH.
by comparison this is a walk in the part

there is no such thing as official bitcoin wallet since bitcoin has no owner or company to release an "official" wallet.
additionally you must stay away from bitcoin.com and any product they give you. it is run by scammers and it has been scamming people for a long time, specially the newcomers. their wallets are also malicious.

most probably the same thing as everyone else in the bitcoin market is waiting for. a signal.
it could be a drop to buy more amount of bitcoin for the same amount of money (aka buy at a discount) which is what every greedy investor does. or it could be the breakout to see the rally begin then jump in to be sure you are not missing any chances to buy "cheap bitcoins".

it IS a coincidence because it only happened ONCE and never before and never after.
if anything bitcoin is following the pandemic and world economy in general as people lost their income, some lost their job, and a large percentage lost a lot of money. THAT affected everything including stock market, bitcoin market, oil market, gold market,.... bitcoin is still not following stock market.

even with that, OP's question wouldn't make any sense.
there is a good chance that he was misled into thinking "fake transactions" are a possibility by video designed to either spread FUD about bitcoin or scam people into buying some sort of "fake transaction builder".
there has been similar cases before where newcomers got ripped off.

that's true but things are a lot more complicated than that in the market that we can't say they pulled the price up or down or contributed to it. for example someone who is selling might have bought their coin over the counter which has no effects on the price or could have mined the coins which again has no effects on the rising price. same with margin traders, they may not pull the price down but only provide liquidity for those who want to buy at a certain price but are waiting.

4 million bitcoins is about 22% of the current circulating supply. so yes, it does matter a lot if those coins were truly lost because they would be out of circulation and it makes bitcoin effectively 22% more scarce.
but the reality is that everyone who talks about "lost" coins are actually talking about "not-moved" coins. and those coins ARE still in circulation.

well i've got bad news for you, it is one of the very basic laws of any market called supply and demand. when there is unlimited supply of something available that thing can never have long term growth. that is one of the reasons why we have inflation in real world, the banks keep printing money (unlimited supply of fiat). a coin like ethereum that also has multiple similar and even better competition (better smart contract platform) that also has unlimited supply has no chance in a million years to reach such a high price like $9k.

i think it will come down to how you do it.
i myself have some little experience in this matter. i have advertised "the wrong way" but have gotten some referrals and made some small amount of bitcoin which was good to satisfy me.

but the "right way" of advertising to get referrals should not be only putting up a banner somewhere or having a signature on a forum. although all those methods are still viable.
instead it should be more focused. for example finding people who would actually gamble and like doing that consistently. there are lots of them out there already.
this is the method that i plan on using soon and see if i can catch some big fishes

if anyone has any experience like this, i'll be glad to hear about it.

i just want to point out that having a ton of features does not make a wallet "modern" or even good. in fact majority of people prefer simpler applications with simpler interfaces instead of something that has loads of options, specially ones that may even open new vulnerabilities in the client.

looking at these numbers i am curious now about the possibility of seeing a miner sponsored spam attack against bitcoin. during 2017 we certainly saw a ton of spam attacks orchestrated by many different groups including shitcoin creators such as Dash and miners were truly enjoying the huge fees. i believe we saw 3BTC per block too for a long time. that today is half the block reward and is a good incentive for a spam attack.

it does look like that the scammer has shot himself in the foot this time and badly so. but from what i have seen from this weasel, he tends to find a way to bullshit his way into a very long debate over everything.
this whole thing is costing me a lot of popcorn though...

the only way you can know if a coin is lost is if you were the person losing those coins. even if you publicly announce you have lost those coins we still have no way of knowing if those coins are actually lost.

so far every single stat that counts "lost coins" is simply calling any coin that has not moved a "lost coin". and that is not just wrong, it is stupid. a couple of weeks ago we saw how early miner(s) signed a message from many addresses that had coins from very early days. these coins are not moved and are being counted as "lost coins".

same with Satoshi coins. there are only 2 known Satoshi addresses as far as i know. the first one that has balance is the one from Genesis block which has unspendable 50BTC due to protocol design. the second address that has no balance is the one he sent bitcoin from to Hal. we don't even know if the change address belongs to Satoshi! so for all we know Satoshi has 0 bitcoins.

there is still no way to count how many coins are lost. so those black squares are (like always) coins that have not moved.

why sadly?
you could look at it as bitcoin trading volume being high as a lot of people trade bitcoin every second of every day that means a lot of liquidity on exchanges which translates into a large volume being in exchange wallets.

bitcoin is not an asset, it is a currency. and it is a very young one at that. seeing volatility in times of worldwide crisis does not mean it is or it isn't a safe haven.
altcoins are neither currencies nor assets. majority of them aren't even safe to buy let alone see as an investment.

bitcoin has a unique characteristic that nothing else has which will also make it an excellent option specially during recessions,...
this characteristic is the fact that it is never following any other market.

what you refer to is only the big every-shitcoin-gets-pumped event that happens during bitcoin bubbles not with every bitcoin bull run. in those events we see literary any shitcoin that is in existence from number 2 on coinmarketcap.com down to number 2000+ get pumped.
but any other time, which is the majority of times, we continue seeing shitcoin pumps all around the altcoin market because otherwise the market closes down due to being useless.