whatever use this serves....I don't think so. addresses are hashes of public keys.
noone knows whether a private key to that public key exists.

Just choose any random address.  The chances of anyone having the private key to it are extremely low.

A few years ago, there was a lady running for office in New Hampshire. Being of the voluntaryist persuasion, she had planned on donating her paycheck back to the residents of the area where she was running (I don't remember how.) She was basically told she couldn't do that, and that if she tried or even kept talking about it, she'd be arrested... buying votes, or some such.

I had thought that a "fair" way for someone wanting to do that... to take wealth and distribute it to others without actually handing them a check... would be to publicly buy bitcoins, then publicly destroy them. Granted, the wealth would only be redistributed to others holding (or acquiring in the future) bitcoins, and wouldn't exactly double the value of a bitcoin (unless you acquire and destroy 3 million or so.) But it might have served the purposes of the above-mentioned candidate without landing her in jail.

It's just a thought experiment, really. I was wondering if such a publicly-known unrecoverable address could be created.

It already got 0.021 BTC.

How do you go about designing an adress like that? I guess you need a few characters at the end to make it pass the verification, but is there a tool to determine them?

One use for this would be to establish reputation score.  

Someone could send bitcoins to the address and then they could be trusted up to that amount.

I think it's something like the first character specify the address type (I gather testnet addresses have a different first digit than live Bitcoin addresses), then whatever you want and the last few characters are a checksum to protect against typo in the address. If you understood the checksum process, it's probably trivial to come up with an address that passes muster in the client, but no one has the private key for.


No, I just saw the address mentioned elsewhere. I'm pretty sure the people sending coins to it are the people who don't particularly give a fuck about Bitcoins, and thought that to the "true believers", seeing some publicly destroyed would make them rage. I guess they don't understand that it has the opposite effect, lost Bitcoins are effectively donated to everyone.

With users with more money to burn having more votes - it's just like the current system, but without the pesky issue of setting up corporations, controlling public opinion, etc. Cut out the middleman - Brilliant!

why the edit to the thread title?

donate to givewell if you really don't want some money.

I thought there was already a way to do this (maybe not with the current client, but in the block chain...basically a way of transferring coins into the void)...I could be mistaken, but I recall asking a similar question months ago and being told this.

There is at least one other use for this that I don't think has been mentioned in this thread...bootstrapping a successor to bitcoin.  If a better virtual currency were invented, it could be brought into existence via the destructive exchange of bitcoins.

Btw, regarding the destruction being the equivalent of dissipating wealth to all other holders of bitcoin, it's a great point and I can imagine that even becoming a gesture of good will for wealthy individuals...they could pledge to take a substantial portion of their bitcoin holdings to their grave (of course, it would be hard to actually verify that unless they sent them to a null address before death).