Address: 1AdHAc4kYrMzwijP75b4qp4xqP3ZRuFqL1

Script: 76a914699599dda59d7f4b73ffa23da578e96da9baff8588ac

Total Lost: 0.49861 BTC

Transactions: 3

How did this script burn BTC?

Multibit’s Corrupted Blockchain.info import

In 2014, a user imported a Blockchain.info wallet into MultiBit. At the time, HD wallets were in their infancy, so each wallet was essentially a bundle of private keys.

After making a transaction, the user realized that the change output was sent to an address listed in the Multibit wallet, but the wallet did not appear to contain a private key for it1.

After some investigation by Mike Hearn, an early Bitcoin developer, it was discovered that during the import process, one of the keys was corrupted2. It remains unknown if this was caused by a bad blockchain.info export or a bug in Multibit.

  1. https://github.com/Multibit-Legacy/multibit/issues/524
  2. https://web.archive.org/web/20140704184820/https://multibit.org/blog/2014/04/28/private-key-safety-improvements.html

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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.

  1. https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/bc520fade5cc838d5c6e9b72d2fc12b691c80125/bip-0039.mediawiki

View revision history
Transaction ID Block Height Amount
778cff3037af9f6c574913384498cc4fc902117777f9dc5af50005817d28f4e1 294741
0.00001 BTC
now $0.62
0.00001 BTC
5096ddaed01a677996aa934af6ca15bece9c211a2bfa22710db9a490c6798b79 294741
0.0001 BTC
now $6.20
0.0001 BTC
a26245890834c2d628dfb7555b9ce8019d2b008e0a1fd616fc411ba9b58adb91 293425
0.4985 BTC
now $30,927.59
0.4985 BTC