Someone just burned $8 million of bitcoin

On Monday at 10am New York time, five old Bitcoin addresses each sent their entire balance to the network’s best-known burn address, 1111111111111111111114oLvT2.

The combined total was over 107 BTC, worth about $8.2 million at the time.

Because the bizarrely selfless transactions occurred at the same time, the action is likely the work of a single person or group acting in synchrony.

Adam Back joked that it increased the accidental quantum bounty pool alongside other burned BTC for whoever cracks elliptic curve cryptography.

The recipient address has no private key. Sends to its public key is the cryptographic equivalent of dropping cash into an incinerator. 

Across more than 256,000 confirmed transactions stretching back to 2010, the address has received 385,811 outputs and spent exactly zero.

Most Bitcoin public keys derive from a private key. In contrast, 111111111111111111114oLvT2 is a syntactically valid address that was handcrafted directly as a Base58Check string.

Because this null address was made first as a public address, attempting to derive backwards from its public key to a private key is computationally infeasible, until someone invents a cryptographically relevant quantum computer in the distant future.

‘Looks like Maximus Retardimus’

The wallet 111111111111111111114oLvT2 has no known or expected private key until the dawn of quantum, so coins sent to this address are effectively burned.

Timechain Index founder Sani flagged the burn. The post collected hundreds of thousands of views within hours.

Protos has previously reported on draft Bitcoin improvement proposals that actually propose burning legacy outputs if their owners don’t migrate coins to quantum-resistant addresses.

Voluntarily piling more coins onto quantum-vulnerable addresses certainly inverts that effort.

Sani replied to Back’s joke in his own thread, “Looks like Maximus Retardimus,” he wrote.

Read more: Cloudflare’s 2029 quantum sprint raises Bitcoin alarm bells

Five wallets, one signature pattern

The five source addresses were:

• 16g5hMoREWqMcaQGvnCHCWPheotD99bVQt
• 1PkWqW1P7KsxYXsAnWMPru6NNTfBeiRT6V
• 1LieqLD1qNadbQrSGjYAUT3tVL2w4cxXQu
• 14UNkCVPDQFCZAvq3j4vUQ6h6pHwBtegMa
• 1JtpAuksysZdwzkCjwQpTG5mzE8BRq7qmh

All five share the same first-seen date on the chain: April 10, 2014. This reinforces the conclusion that today’s burn was likely one person or synchronized group.

Each transaction used an identical locktime of 950,958, identical RBF preferences, and a fee rate of 1.81 satoshis per vByte. Each consolidated multiple UTXOs into a single output.

Transaction execution lined up to the second across all five wallets. 

That pattern points to a single controller running an action in parallel, not five strangers coincidentally arriving at the same, bizarre conclusion.

After the burn, all five source addresses hold exactly zero satoshis. The largest of the five, 1PkWqW1P7Ks…, moved 551.86 BTC through 71 transactions over a decade.

Its final transaction sent 1.42 BTC to the null address.

A growing pile of burned bitcoin

The May 25 burn pushed the null address from roughly 700 BTC to 807.24 BTC, a 15.3% jump in a single block.

That number has been climbing for years. A Bitcoin community post in February 2025 measured the address at 669 BTC. Holdings were closer to 555 BTC roughly two years earlier.

At today’s BTC price, the wallet contains over $62 million of permanently destroyed coins.

Unlike Ethereum, where EIP-1559 burns base fees automatically with every transaction, Bitcoin has no protocol-level destruction mechanism. Every satoshi at 1111111111111111111114oLvT2 had to be deliberately sent there by someone holding a working private key.

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