Address: 1HAEA2h7it1w8U1sLgQYNS9eYLjTCR6Z9E

Script: 76a914b140bceda61459b18c5008c5e54f7096bfff67ad88ac

Total Lost: 5.661 BTC

Transactions: 2

How did this script burn BTC?

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
25d6813fcc6f59b8f0919fa525cb17d540397c8ea36221df644a2876c60b813a 171746
5.66 BTC
now $355,537.99
5.66 BTC
bd082091ece3853f7128ee199a09a3a788b6a351d5bc9a3bfc71319d0316fe80 171329
0.001 BTC
now $62.82
0.001 BTC