burned.money is an open source burned coin tracker. All information on this site is indexed directly from the Bitcoin Blockchain, with explanations contributed by the community via its GitHub repository. The implementation, as well as the database of burn scripts can be reviewed within the GitHub repository by anyone. Contributions are welcome.

Protocol Bugs

Some amount of BTC is lost due to implementation issues with the protocol itself. Notably, this includes the 50 BTC from the genesis block, as well as a handful of other cases. The BTC involved in these instances was simply never minted, and thus directly reduces the total supply.

Miner Error

On occasion, miners make mistakes which result in the coinbase output of a block minting less than the entitled amount of the block subsidy + transaction fees. This is an irreversible error, and any BTC not claimed by the miners is lost forever.

Transactional Burns

BTC sent to OP_RETURN outputs, addresses with lost private keys, or otherwise unspendable addresses also contribute to a reduction in the supply of BTC. These are tracked by indexing OP_RETURN outputs, and maintaining a database of "burn scripts" - scripts which are known to be unspendable or have lost/unknown private keys.