Quote from: JahPowerBit on January 26, 2014, 10:12:12 PM

Quote from: buybitcoinscanada on January 26, 2014, 07:46:06 PM

Quote from: PhantomPhreak on January 02, 2014, 04:34:13 PM

Quote from: xibeijan on January 02, 2014, 04:31:27 PM

How is the BTC burned? Does that mean I lose the BTC forever? How is this accomplished, technically?

~~The BTC are given to Bitcoin miners in fees.~~ BTC are sent to addresses for which there is no private key. That makes them impossible to get back.

How can you have an address for which there is no private key? Wouldn't someone have to generate that address and wouldn't you need to trust that person to not have copied it and keep it in secret? Especially a vanity address such as the counterparty one?

just try to generate a vanity address such as the counterparty one and you will understand. There is a private key for this address, but nobody knows it.

https://github.com/samr7/vanitygen

Here's an online one as well. https://bitcoinvanity.appspot.com/

It's easy enough to generate a vanity address with a few specified characters at the beginning, but with the counterparty address it would be impossible to check enough combinations to generate the address independently. If someone could do that they could also crack the private key of any address.