- A single entity burned over 107 BTC ($8.2 million) by sending it to a well-known, unrecoverable “null” address.
- The five source wallets, all created on the same date in 2014, executed identical transactions to the second, confirming a coordinated act.
- This single event increased the null address’s holdings by 15.3%, bringing its total to over 807 BTC ($62 million) in permanently destroyed coins.
- Unlike Ethereum, Bitcoin has no protocol-level burn mechanism; every satoshi sent to this address is a deliberate, permanent loss.
On Monday at 10 a.m. New York time, a coordinated entity sent the entire balances from five old Bitcoin wallets, totaling over 107 BTC worth $8.2 million, to the network’s best-known burn address. The recipient, 1111111111111111111114oLvT2, is a syntactically valid address with no known private key, making any funds sent there permanently destroyed.
Because the bizarrely selfless transactions occurred at the same time, the action is likely the work of a single person or group acting in synchrony. Adam Back joked that it increased the accidental quantum bounty pool for whoever cracks elliptic curve cryptography in the future.
The five source addresses all shared the same first-seen date on the chain: April 10, 2014. Each transaction used an identical locktime, fee rate, and RBF preference, with execution lined up to the second.
Timechain Index founder Sani flagged the burn, which collected hundreds of thousands of views. Sani replied to Back’s joke in his own thread, “Looks like Maximus Retardimus,” he wrote.
Consequently, the May 25 burn pushed the null address from roughly 700 BTC to 807.24 BTC, a 15.3% jump in a single block. At today’s price, the wallet contains over $62 million of permanently destroyed coins.
Unlike Ethereum, where EIP-1559 burns base fees automatically, Bitcoin has no protocol-level destruction mechanism. Every satoshi at this address had to be deliberately sent there by someone holding a working private key.
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