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Comment by btreecat | Hacker News Reader

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 circulation by any means would have the same result as "destroying" them.

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).

This is why Bitcoin needs to start expiring unspent outputs that are more than 5 years old.

Like how you can't use paper money that was printed before 2010? That makes sense.

> 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.

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.

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!

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.

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