The bitcoin that will never move again.
A public registry of well-known burn addresses and the coins sent to them — plus a free, open-source tool to permanently destroy your own BTC using OP_RETURN, the standard method that's provably unspendable by consensus rule.
Since the earliest days of Bitcoin, people have chosen to send coins somewhere they can
never return. Some did it as a
gift to everyone — every satoshi destroyed makes the
twenty-one million that remain a little scarcer, a quiet tribute to every hodler who ever held. Others
burned coins to birth new things: the Counterparty and
Chancecoin communities famously destroyed thousands of BTC to mint tokens no one could counterfeit,
turning fire into proof. Some sent coins into the void as a
memorial — a way to honor a person, mark a moment, or
etch a message into the blockchain forever. And a few simply wanted to prove a point: that in a world
obsessed with having more, the most radical act can be to give something up completely,
with nothing asked in return.
A burn is Bitcoin's version of setting money adrift on the sea —
not lost, but given, permanently, to the whole network.
Read this first: these addresses aren't truly burned
Every address listed below is believed unspendable because no known private key exists for it — but that's a computational assumption, not a mathematical proof. A matching private key could theoretically exist; finding one would just take more energy than the solar system will produce in its lifetime (unless a future quantum computer changes that math).
The genesis address is a special case: it's an ordinary address that Satoshi very likely holds the key to. Its original 50 BTC coinbase reward is stuck for an unrelated protocol reason, but coins sent there afterward could, in principle, be spent by whoever holds that key. For a burn that's provable rather than merely infeasible, use our OP_RETURN tool below.
Nothing on this site is an inducement to burn bitcoin — it's a reference and a tool, not advice. Verify every figure here yourself on a block explorer before trusting it.
Well-known burn addresses
A walk through Bitcoin's history of destruction, beginning with the genesis block. Balances are public and verifiable on any block explorer, and shown here approximately — they change as people keep sending coins to these addresses.
Our tool burns BTC the provable way
Every address above is only believed unspendable. Our free burn tool does something categorically stronger: it sends your coins into an OP_RETURN output — a script that fails for every possible unlocking attempt, enforced by consensus rules on every full node. There's no private key that could exist, because there's no key involved at all.
And it never touches your private key. The tool only builds an unsigned transaction (a PSBT). You review it, then sign it yourself in a wallet you already trust. Nothing to paste, nothing to leak.
One catch, up front: broadcasting a burn needs your own Bitcoin Core node — public push endpoints refuse transactions that send value into an OP_RETURN. The tool explains the exact command when it hands you the PSBT.
Open the burn tool →OP_RETURN <optional message>
value: 0.05000000 BTC
# any attempt to spend it:
→ script hits OP_RETURN
→ execution halts, FAILS
→ unspendable, forever ✓
"No known key" vs. "no key possible"
A private key could theoretically exist — nobody's found one, and finding one is considered impossible in practice. But "impossible in practice" rests on a hardness assumption, not a proof. A future quantum computer, or an astronomically lucky guess, is the (vanishingly small) caveat.
No key is involved at all. The output can't be spent because the script itself is defined to fail — checked and enforced by every full node as a core consensus rule. This isn't "we think no one can spend it," it's "the network will reject any attempt to." A genuinely different, stronger guarantee.