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Is there a reason you can't just delete the wallet that holds the coins and make sure you don't have any backups? It seems that just removing them from circula

• pavel_lishin 11y ago
  > Is there a reason you can't just delete the wallet that holds the coins and make sure you don't have any backups? But you can't prove that you did that to anyone else.
  • clarkmoody 11y ago
    Right. This is where the phrase proof of burn comes in. It is nice to show, in a provable way, that you have have destroyed the coins.
• cperciva 11y ago
  The distinction between "destroyed" and "lost" is significant, to the extent that if coins have been destroyed people know that the coins will never resurface; it's impossible to distinguish between coins which are lost and coins which have simply been unspent (e.g., the Satoshi hoard).
  • aaron_m04 11y ago
    This is why Bitcoin needs to start expiring unspent outputs that are more than 5 years old.
    • Kapow 11y ago
      Like how you can't use paper money that was printed before 2010? That makes sense.
• saosebastiao 11y ago
  Or you could do like I did and let 33 of them fester in a landfill in Cleveland because I couldn't be bothered to copy them to my new hard drive because they were only worth $0.10 at the time. Doh!
  • mirimir 11y ago
    I sold my first ~500 to DPR when he was building liquidity in preparation to open Silk Road. As I recall, he was offering about $1. That was after I totally got the lack of anonymity, but before the first reliable mixing services. I did well on investments and earnings from late 2012 through late 2013. And I managed to invest much of it in co-located servers. But it was nothing like $500K. So it goes.