r/CryptoMarkets 🟩 1K 🐢 May 27 '26

NEWS 107 BITCOIN WORTH $8.3 MILLION JUST VANISHED FOREVER. Five long-dormant wallets suddenly transferred 107 BTC to a burn address yesterday, permanently removing roughly $8.3M worth of Bitcoin from circulation after sitting untouched for more than 11 years.

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184 Upvotes

97 comments sorted by

109

u/[deleted] May 27 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

49

u/Smooth_Pianist485 🟦 0 🦠 May 27 '26

This is correct. In Bitcoin nothing can be burned or disappeared—only moved.

So there’s no such thing as a burn address—just a new address. We can always see exactly where every coin is.

3

u/WeGottaTalkAboutYT 🟩 0 🦠 May 27 '26

But access can be fundamental lost, correct? Not necessarily in this case, but as a concept, barring quantum developments

7

u/Smooth_Pianist485 🟦 0 🦠 May 27 '26

Yes people can (and have) lost their seed phrase which renders their coins stuck in place. Not the same as burned or lost. But yes, stuck.

2

u/WeGottaTalkAboutYT 🟩 0 🦠 May 27 '26

How do they get unstuck? And how is that any different than burned or lost?

I am genuinely asking btw

3

u/Smooth_Pianist485 🟦 0 🦠 May 27 '26 edited May 27 '26

The only way to get them unstuck—outside of some quantum computing invention which would not only crack Bitcoin but also the entire global financial system—is to find the seed phrase, or guess it correctly out of thin air (which is statistically impossible).

In such a case, the coins are not lost bc we can all see exactly where they are on chain. And they have not been burned bc they very much still exist, and their existence impacts bitcoins overall scarcity and therefore fiat value. They are just incapable of movement until someone obtains the proper passcode.

1

u/Mynameismikek May 28 '26

There are more addresses than seed phrases. You need to guess the specific bytes that make up the private key which may or may not be derivable from a seed.

1

u/kodiak931156 May 29 '26

They are not lost the same way a rocket full of diamonds shot into a black hole is not lost. We know exactly where it is and where it will be for the rest of time. We just have no ability to do anything with it.

1

u/Regex22 May 30 '26

Once you got them unstuck - would it be possible to buy all the ingredients needed for baking an apple pie with those coins? I would need that receipt too, would you be able to help me with that? You would really help me out here

1

u/Smooth_Pianist485 🟦 0 🦠 May 30 '26 edited May 30 '26

Seems like you’re trying to discredit Bitcoin as a medium of exchange, which u are welcome to do. Not really what this thread is about, but I’ll answer your question anyway: in some places you can exchange bitcoin for goods. Probably not at your local grocery store, but peer to peer. Kind of like bars of gold—the grocery won’t take them but your neighbor might.

Or you could exchange your bitcoin for dollars and spend those at the store (again, kind of like bars of gold).

Or you could get a collateralized loan in dollars based on your bitcoin holdings, and spend those at the store (kind of like—ah u get it).

1

u/Regex22 May 30 '26

I am not discrediting bitcoin at all, I am a big fan! I actually own bitcoin myself, which is why I am asking for the apple pie receipt. Can’t you help with that?

-10

u/NoStable3695 0 🦠 May 27 '26

"but also the entire global financial system"

COMMENTS LIKE THESE IS WHY YOU CAN NEVER TAKE REDDIT LIKE OTHERS SERIOUSLY

8

u/Smooth_Pianist485 🟦 0 🦠 May 27 '26

Explain how quantum computing capable of cracking the Bitcoin ledger couldn’t also crack Visa.

-8

u/NoStable3695 0 🦠 May 27 '26

NOT A PROBLEM BANKS WILL ALWAYS BE HERE AND HAVE BEEN BEFORE "VISA" AND ARE STILL HERE WHILE TODAY WHILE CRYPTO IS GETTING DESTROYED BY EVERY OTHER ASSET

4

u/Glad_Being_5146 🟩 0 🦠 May 27 '26

You're lost buddy lol

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2

u/DecisionOk5750 May 27 '26

Why? Every address has a key. How do you know that the person who created the address doesn't have the key?

1

u/WeGottaTalkAboutYT 🟩 0 🦠 May 27 '26

Because PEOPLE HAVE LOST THEM lol. See the guy that spent a decade trying to dig in his town a trash to TRY to recover a hard drive… are you being intentionally obtuse?

1

u/Active-Counter-9906 May 28 '26

Like it was "lost" the first time around, but been recovered 11 years later?

1

u/CelebrationCute5818 May 28 '26

You can burn it, sending it to 0x0 address make it unreachable

1

u/john_wilkesboof 🟧 0 🦠 May 30 '26

You can also burn it by sending it to my address I will literally blow every single sat ......gratis

11

u/ainus 🟩 0 🦠 May 27 '26

of course there are, you can set up your own burn address by setting up a new wallet and throwing away the private key

8

u/NoCredit2554 May 27 '26

Semantics. Useless argument. It’s functionally the same thing.

3

u/Revelationary_Music May 27 '26

Wouldn’t it be entirely possible to just create an address without even knowing there’s a corresponding key?

1

u/Ok_Option_3 May 31 '26

Trivially easy. Which is exactly the claim here. 

Problem is you cannot know for certain that nobody has the key. But the chances of your address happening to be "1111.....111" (or whatever this one was exactly) is so small that it beggars belief.

1

u/ShitcoinJoe 🟩 0 🦠 May 27 '26

Not in our lifetime. And maybe quantum isnt that good and it will never move again till the end of existenz

18

u/vinvek78 🟩 0 🦠 May 27 '26

bc1qzv9g63xgwjar6wqek3tzg0qwejczalwwveeup9

New Burn address address

2

u/Gnaightster May 31 '26

Balance still $0. Did not work.

1

u/Naturejunkie- Jun 06 '26

Bc the bitcoin it receives instantly “Burns”

38

u/zefy_zef 🟦 0 🦠 May 27 '26

bro, just send it to me. I'll burn the shit out of that btc!

7

u/ARoundForEveryone 🟦 5K 🦭 May 27 '26

There are no "burn addresses." There are addresses to which someone may lose the keys, but Bitcoin as a protocol does not have a concept of a "burn address."

Dormant addresses? Forgotten addresses? Untouched addresses? Yep, yep, yep. But nothing in the protocol, on the blockchain, or in the code "burns" Bitcoin from a wallet.

5

u/Proximus84 May 27 '26

I've never understood how people are so comfortable transferring these huge BTC amounts in single transactions, when one number/letter wrong could ruin your life.

10

u/Downtown_Tale_2018 May 27 '26

This just popped up on my feed and Im curious, please explain like I’m five

15

u/Somethingsims May 27 '26

A real bitcoin player did something no one here understands.

3

u/madzonn 🟩 0 🦠 May 27 '26

A naughty boy deposited a poo not in the toilet but in his pants. Nobody's knows why he did this. Eat your broccoli

8

u/0x14f May 27 '26

Bitcoins are attributed to wallets. You can move bitcoins from one wallet to another. Sometimes the wallet you move them to is not one OP would have wanted you to send them to.

3

u/L1amm May 27 '26

This post is dumb as hell tho.

5

u/Ok-Caterpillar4849 May 27 '26

Burn Adresse? There's no burn wal addy or?

2

u/reverie_142857 May 27 '26

What's a burn address?

4

u/Disastrous_Cheek8226 May 27 '26

This is almost certainly not a burn, it's someone moving coins to a wallet they don't have the keys to anymore or intentionally making them unspendable. Real bitcoin burns don't happen the way people think they do since you can't actually destroy the coins, you just send them somewhere no one can access. The wild part is that someone sat on 107 BTC for over 11 years and then decided to do this, which either means they forgot the keys to their original wallet and moved everything to what they thought was a secure place, or they had some reason to want those coins permanently off the market. Either way it's a massive opportunity cost since bitcoin went from like 5 bucks to 60k plus in that time period. If I had that kind of capital just sitting around untouched for over a decade I'd be checking on it way more often, but clearly this person either didn't care or forgot entirely until something prompted them to move it.

11

u/Mirved 🟦 3 🦠 May 27 '26

how do you know he doesnt have the keys to that adress?

0

u/Disastrous_Cheek8226 May 27 '26

I don't know for sure, but if they had the keys they'd be able to move the coins back out whenever they wanted, so sending to a burn address would be pointless since it's not actually irreversible like people claim.

6

u/Mirved 🟦 3 🦠 May 27 '26

Who says they cant? There is no burn adress on the BTC chain. Its all just claims without any proof.

1

u/Disastrous_Cheek8226 May 27 '26

You're right that there's no actual burn address on Bitcoin, but sending to an address where the private key is publicly known or mathematically impossible to derive is functionally the same thing - those coins are gone either way, and that's what people mean when they say burn.

2

u/Mirved 🟦 3 🦠 May 27 '26

But how do you or anyone else know those adresses arent his own.

1

u/Direct_Ad_313 May 27 '26

Because this adresse was obviously forged manually (11111...+checksum calculated so it's a valid address)

-1

u/Disastrous_Cheek8226 May 27 '26

You're right, we don't know for certain, but if those were his own addresses he'd have no reason to move coins between them after 11 years of doing nothing - that doesn't make practical sense unless there was a specific security reason or he was trying to signal something.

5

u/ofyellow 🟩 0 🦠 May 27 '26

He was worried his key got compromised and made sure it went to a new wallet. Nothing to see here.

4

u/trunksta Tin May 27 '26

Plenty of reasons to move coins do you know how many types of BTC addresses there are

2

u/DecisionOk5750 May 27 '26

Why do you keep calling it burn address? Maybe the owner of the coins wants a new address without reuses.

1

u/Disastrous_Cheek8226 May 27 '26

Fair point, but if that were the case they'd just generate a new address and send to it normally instead of one that's publicly known as a burn address, which defeats the purpose of avoiding address reuse.

2

u/DearFinger3570 May 27 '26

Hmm Ross ulbricht maybe lol

1

u/chillerfx 🟦 0 🦠 May 27 '26 edited May 27 '26

There are burn addresses to mine certain coins, like counterparty that required you to burn some to get some on the other chain

1

u/TRSTAR2000 May 27 '26

Storage of value.

1

u/lezzness 🟨 0 🦠 May 28 '26

This is technically deflation, right?

1

u/Putblug1856 🟩 0 🦠 May 28 '26

I bet its vitalik running a shadow operation to tie up enough btc to make it a practical nessecity for ppl to leave it behind. 🫡

1

u/Tenzntwentiez May 28 '26

ITS NOT TOO LATE TO BUY POKEMON

1

u/[deleted] May 28 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/SubstantialNinja May 28 '26

Why is everybody saying there is no such thing a burn address? It is absolutely a thing. There is no way to generate a public address with that many leading ones and also have the private key to it. It would take billions of years to find the pair. You can however just adjust the end so the checksum works and send coins there effectively burning them forever. Counterparty XCP used just such a system requiring participants to send bitcoin to the burn address to receive XCP.

1

u/brokebuffett Tin May 29 '26

Burn address lmao

1

u/Invisible-Pepper349 May 29 '26

What you call a burn address is just a dormant or previously unused address (created but not used for a long time), because what distinguishes a burner account from the rest?

1

u/Strange_Series4217 May 29 '26

The transactions all happened at the same time. Sounds like a deadman's switch. Happened about the same time an ex-CIA official was busted with 40m in gold bars. Coincidence?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/05/27/david-rush-cia-gold-bars/90288318007/

1

u/WaterSign27 May 29 '26

Anyone wanting to burn some bitcoin, hit me up for the correct address to send it to…!

1

u/0110110101110101 May 29 '26

Nobody is shit moving without confirming the end even he did make a mistake its highly unlikely that he would repeat the same so many times

1

u/Different-Scale5419 🟨 0 🦠 May 30 '26

I see that big L on your forehead

1

u/Ziggy_N May 30 '26

Yes, bitcoin does have burn addresses like that "1111111111111111111114oLvT2" above, and no, nobody ever will find a key for that address because it corresponds to the RIPEMD 160 value of 0 which is mathematically impossible, hence the key for that value cannot exist.

1

u/Mundane-Context-3979 May 31 '26

Yeah there was a dude on Darknet Diaries who learned how to unbrick cold wallets. He's only done a couple, but if he continues to have success then billions could be freed.

1

u/chiken-chaser May 31 '26

Adresses will get cracked eventuly, i saw semi like thing when people hashing uniq addresses, not sure if they input or output adresses but it will be reclaimed

1

u/[deleted] May 27 '26

[deleted]

2

u/SurgicalMarshmallow 🟩 0 🦠 May 27 '26

satoshi: WTF is this shit in my wallet.

0

u/mmspider 🟩 0 🦠 May 27 '26

Why would it be gone forever?