Re: [ANN] Counterparty Protocol and Client (built on Bitcoin)

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?

I actually don't know for sure, but the way I've come to understand it is; there are basically enough addresses similiar to the amount of sand particles on earth times sand particles on earth and then some. Each of these addresses are already capable of being used. My guess is that someone somewhere in a hundred to a thousand years would be issued that counterparty address and win the lottery. As far as I know its not really possible to have an unspendable address.

It's kind of like if i sent $100 to asdfasdfasdjfskldjflsdjf@hotmail.com via paypal. It would go through, even if that email address didn't have a paypal account. But then if I created that email account and joined paypal, theoretically I would be authorized to claim that money.

I would say that the chances of someone recieving that counterparty address though, are so slim, it may never actually happen. But can someone correct me if I'm wrong ? I'm just guessing.

Numbers of grains of sand in the world: About 10^18
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_grains_of_sand_are_there_in_the_world

Numbers of stars in the universe: About 10^23 (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/01/number-of-stars-in-universe_n_790563.html)

Number of possible unique bitcoin addresses: 58^27 (excluding checksum) ~ 10^47

If every star in the universe had an earthlike planet (hardly true), and every grain of sand on these planets represented a bitcoin address ... we would still fall way short of the number of possible addresses.

Humans are just not that good with very large numbers.

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It's kind of like if i sent $100 to asdfasdfasdjfskldjflsdjf@hotmail.com via paypal. It would go through, even if that email address didn't have a paypal account. But then if I created that email account and joined paypal, theoretically I would be authorized to claim that money.

Ah, but that's the beauty of asymmetric key encryption. Say that you in fact sent money to asdfasdfasdjfskldjflsdjf@hotmail.com ... but no one else knows that. What bitcoin does is allow anyone to verify that you in fact sent that amount ... without disclosing the ability to actually make that account to anyone. I'm still amazed at the brilliance of bitcoin on a day to day basis, hence why I took the time to write this post, even though the things here are obvious

PS A birthday attack on a bitcoin address is FAR more likely (sqrt(10^47) = 3 * 10^23 which is close to 1 mole). There are several million bitcoin addresses that have been used so far. It is possible (though still hideously unlikely) that someone generates the private key to an already used addresses in the next several hundred thousand years, assuming human civilization survives that long (which will most likely contain a balance of zero). Generating the address to a particular account, though, is 0.000000000000000000000001 times as likely. (Bitcoin doesn't break when that happens, though. All you basically end up with is an equivalent of a copy of wallet.dat.)