It is a Bitcoin address to which more than 13 bitcoins have been sent, but they will never be recovered. This is because the address does not have a private key associated with it, and therefore it is impossible to access the funds. Some think it is an experiment, a joke, or a way of burning bitcoins to reduce the supply and increase the price.
12 sats \ 5 replies \ @OriginalSize 9 Aug 2023
Well actually there are many associated private keys, but nobody in this universe will fine one.
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0 sats \ 4 replies \ @nemo 9 Aug 2023
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2 sats \ 3 replies \ @OriginalSize 9 Aug 2023
Not impossible, but yes very very low. Like so low that we humans don't intuitively get it. The stackexchange link probably points to the math.
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0 sats \ 2 replies \ @nemo 9 Aug 2023
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21 sats \ 1 reply \ @Murch 10 Aug 2023
No, the address space is more of a "the sun will burn out before you could compute a negligible fraction of the addresses with all computing power on the planet" kinda scale.
Also see: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/q/22/5406
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nemo 10 Aug 2023
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2 sats \ 1 reply \ @SimpleStacker 9 Aug 2023
Here's an old Stack Exchange post
If you look at the addresses' activity you'll see that people are still actively sending bitcoin to this address, but coins are not moving out of it.
I assume there is a service out there that burns bitcoin to this address as part of its function.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nemo 9 Aug 2023
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @lightcoin_ 9 Aug 2023
Yep. You can find a whole list of burn addresses here: https://forums.counterparty.io/t/list-of-burn-addresses-addresses-without-known-private-key/1359
Note that this is generally considered a "bad" way to burn BTC, because it adds bloat to the UTXO set. The "good" way to burn BTC is using OP_RETURN outputs.
https://medium.com/@alcio/how-to-destroy-bitcoins-255bb6f2142e
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nemo 9 Aug 2023
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0 sats \ 2 replies \ @Hypnagog 9 Aug 2023
How are you so certain there is no private key? Every address requires a private key. Unless you are saying they just typed the public address without knowing the private key?
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21 sats \ 0 replies \ @nerd2ninja 9 Aug 2023
Exactly. They typed out a few words and calculated the required checksum at the end to make it a valid address.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @tmoney 9 Aug 2023
Not every address requires a private key! https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/72700/transactions-without-signatures
This address represents a P2PKH, so the hash160(public key) = 759d6677091e973b9e9d99f19c68fbf43e3f05f9. I don't understand the math well enough to know if there is a public key that satisfies that equation, but if there is, then a private key exists as well.
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