Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Thoughts on burner addresses
by
larry_vw_1955
on 03/06/2022, 10:22:24 UTC
Not only that but that someone will end up cracking to get the cash if the balance gets too big. The chance of that is probably even bigger.
It is not possible to "crack" a bitcoin address.

I meant that using burner addresses like the bitcoineater one, no one really knows if someone possesses the private key to it or not. you don't expect that anyone knows it but you don't know exactly how they came up with that address so you can't really say for sure. as more bitcoin comes into the "burner address" and none of it ever gets sent out, you get more confidence that maybe it really is the case that no one knows a private key for it. but you aren't sure 100%. i wouldn't trust a burner address. unless i was the one that made it up. but then other people couldnt trust me. so it's like a circular problem that can't get resolved.

Quote
Besides, if anyone wanted to waste their time on an impossible task they would have chosen one of the existing addresses with large balance instead of a burn address that would have far less.
For example 1P5ZEDWTKTFGxQjZphgWPQUpe554WKDfHQ contains about $4 billion worth of bitcoin.

Well I don't think that's how people go about trying to crack bitcoin addresses by picking a particular one. But that address would certainly be one they would want to know about. But why is someone using a legacy address to hold that much BTC? That seems risky. In the sense that it's an all or nothing proposition. Lose your private key or if someone else gets your private key, it's all gone.