Address: 16DsRFSCbv8aPMmDcbP4wYsS4FV9hf6rt2
Script: 76a9143947b5155f8641756a90c935fbf61814a65ec4a288ac
Total Lost: 1.2 BTC
Transactions: 1
How did this script burn BTC?
ksd5’s Lost Key
On July 14th, bitcointalk user ksd5 created a thread1 trying to trace BTC sent to a change address.
It emerged that while trying to test double spend protection, the user inadvertently overwrote the wallet.dat file containing the private key to a change address which held their 1.2 BTC balance.
While the address is not explicitly stated in the post, enough information is provided to enable us to trace the transaction and address involved2.
Lost Keys
The majority of Bitcoin is secured through the use of private keys. Wallet applications generate public and private keypairs, which are used to generate an address.
Modern wallets use deterministic systems such as BIP391 to generate a root key which is used to derive every subsequent key. Thus, ensuring you have a reliable, safe backup of the root key, typically a 12 or 24 word mnemonic phrase, is sufficient to recover access to your funds.
Before such systems were developed, most wallets stored each keypair individually. This resulted in a number of additional ways to lose access to your coins - old backups wouldn’t be able to recover any keys for addresses generated after the backup was taken, for instance.
Over the years, wallet applications have also had a number of bugs, leading to unstable key production, bad encryption, and other cases which inadvertently resulted in funds being directed to addresses without known keys.
Even if the wallets work perfectly, users do still lose access to their keys by neglecting to make backups or other mistakes. burned.money’s lost_keys group tracks cases for which there is a reasonable degree of confidence that the keys are genuinely and truly lost.
View revision history| Transaction ID | Block Height | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| 05c42b16d2b384cf602fae2d97d2e557f442252fb2f4f695eb81991a13443777 | 67435 |
1.2 BTC
now
$74,449.68
|