There is a treasure trove of tokens sent to address(0) to "burn" under the assumption that no one has the private key. and no one ever will.
In a manner of speaking, I would classify it as a very large open bounty. It's like a pinata for mathematicians and quantum computers.
Hope it helps.
Answer from Rob Hitchens on Stack ExchangeThere is a treasure trove of tokens sent to address(0) to "burn" under the assumption that no one has the private key. and no one ever will.
In a manner of speaking, I would classify it as a very large open bounty. It's like a pinata for mathematicians and quantum computers.
Hope it helps.
The genesis block is a special block which was mined by nobody and therefore is associated with the account 0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000.
It's impossible to generate the private key for this address and people can use it as proof-of-burn account on the Ethereum blockchain.
I see that https://etherscan.io/address/0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 owns almost $3 billion in tokens plus $3.5 million ETH.
Is this a burn address? I know in Bitcoin that one can send BTC to an address where no-one knows the private key. Is the same true in Ethereum? If someone wanted to prove that they had "destroyed" a token could they send it to the above-referenced address?
Find Out What The Burn Address Is For Ethereum (ETH)
ether - Is it possible in theory to generate the private key for the 0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 wallet? - Ethereum Stack Exchange
Warn users who enter a "To" address of 0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 in the "Send Ether" page
wallets - If someone found a private key to 0x0, would they be able to access all the tokens (over one billion dollars worth) stored there? - Ethereum Stack Exchange
This type of attractive address names called vanity addresses and you can use https://github.com/MyEtherWallet/VanityEth to generate them. If you are very very very lucky one day you'll get it.
Yes it's possible in theory, but the probability of generating the private key for the 0x0 address (and any others) is:
Near enough to zero you could convert the entire solar system to a computer and try until the end of the universe and never succeed.
Yes, the protocol allows it: the protocol does not have any special treatment that prevents the zero address from operating like all other addresses if its private key was found.
Hypothetically speaking, yes. If someone managed to guess a private key to 0x0, then they would have full control over all ether/tokens belonging to that address. It is so unlikely that it's considered impossible because you would have to randomly generate private keys until you found one that generates the 0x0 address. Also, there might not even be a private key that generates the 0x0 address because of the non-1-to-1 nature of hashes.
Yes they would have access to all the tokens and ETH. The only way to carry out such attack would be creating keypairs until you reach that address'es keypair. But you must understand that achieving success with such attack is extremely unlikely.