Someone just deleted $8.2 million worth of bitcoin by sending it to a burn address

Someone just sent a crazy amount of money – 107 bitcoins, worth $8.2 million – to a burn address which has no private key, meaning that the money will never be recovered.

Five transactions have been recorded on the bitcoin blockchain, sending a total of 107.13 BTC (~$8.24M) to the address 1111111111111111111114oLvT2, which is one the most well known “burn addresses.”

This bitcoin address is derived from the public key of all zeros – skipping the usual step of generating the private key needed to spend BTC. Bitcoins sent there are effectively destroyed, because no one has the private key and its nearly mathematically impossible to find one.

All transactions came from 5 different wallets in a short time window of two minutes. The largest transaction destroyed 36.79 BTC ($2.83 million), followed by another transaction of nearly 29 BTC, and two transactions of around 20 BTC each.

The transactions took the industry by surprise. Currently, no explanation exists why they were made.

“It remains unclear whether the transfers were accidental, intentional burns, or something else,” WU Blockchain posted.

All five source wallets are old and trace their origins back to the same date, April 10th, 2014, when they received their initial bitcoin. This is another signal of a single owner behind them.

All wallets were completely emptied. The largest wallet has transacted 71 times on the bitcoin blockchain previously, receiving and transferring a total of 551.85696660 BTC ($42,612,595), but its “contribution” to the burn address was the smallest, just over 1 BTC.

Most of the bitcoin was sitting untouched for more than a decade, from the time when the price of 1BTC was $442. The current bitcoin price, $77.907, is 176 times higher.

The aforementioned burn address has already accumulated 807.24 BTC, worth $62M, across 256,296 lifetime transactions. Most previous transactions are tiny, just fractions of a dollar, because the wallet has been used as a proof-of-concept mechanism by several other protocols.

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