Announcing
burned.money - a tracker designed to monitor the Bitcoin supply.
OverviewI track cases of lost, burned, or never-mined BTC to give a lower bound on the amount of BTC that's been lost (and inversely, an upper bound on the Circulating Supply)
The site is intended as a resource for anyone interested or participating in the Bitcoin ecosystem, as well as researchers or other parties who look into specific instances or time periods.
MethodologyThere are a few different things tracked by burned.money:
1.
Miner losses - this covers BTC that was never mined to begin with, such as the
50 BTC from the genesis block, the duplicate coinbase transactions from blocks
91722 and
91812, as well as instances where miners claim a lower block reward than permitted by subsidy + fees, such as
block 1247242.
OP_RETURN - OP_RETURNs provably mark BTC as unspendable, so any BTC sent to an OP_RETURN is effectively destroyed. Check out
this transaction that sends 1.888 BTC to its demise.
3.
Unspendable Scripts - There have been cases where BTC was sent to scripts which can never be redeemed, such as the
Mt. Gox burn of 2609+ BTC, and the
P2Pool coinbase tx output construction error
4.
Cryptographic constraints - On occasion, addresses have been constructed which would be invalid on Bitcoin's secp256k1 implementation:
https://burned.money/scriptgroup/ecdsa_incompatibility5.
Burn addresses - A variety of
Burn Addresses are tracked, such as
1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE and
1CounterpartyXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXUWLpVr.
6.
Lost keys - Perhaps the most controversial category, since it is rather difficult to prove a key has been lost. I try to restrict this to cases with some degree of confidence. To end up on this list, the public addresses must be known, and I should be reasonably convinced that the key is truly lost. However, the indexer does monitor the chain to ensure that if any coins from any output marked as burned are moved at some point in the future, they are added back to the supply figures.
Why?As far as I'm aware, there is no high-quality index of such data -
bitcoin-supply.com is the closest, but restricts itself to OP_RETURN and miner errors.
Upcoming/Planned Features1. Exporting of data - The database is large, but not unbearably so (~500GB uncompressed). I intend to make this available as an SQLite/CSV dump for anyone wanting to do more indepth research
2. Adding more cases - there are several cases on my radar, such as the scripts made unspendable by the P2SH changes, as well as invalid taproot ecdsa constructs, and a laundry list of other burn addresses
3. Exploring the dataset - Even with a cursory look over the past few days, there are quite a few interesting patterns to share and write up on
4. More informative parsing of OP_RETURNs - right now, everything is nulldata - eventually, I'd like to mark Omni, Runes, etc. more clearly
5. Statistics - Presently, charing is limited to the supply curve - with all the data available, many interesting statistics can be shared.
6. RSS Feeds - Subscribe to new losses in transactions and blocks Implemented at
burned.money/feedsHELP CONTRIBUTEThe tracker is only as good as its data and implementation. The code is available at
github.com/RaghavSood/btcsupply.
If you are aware of any more burns, losses, or lost keys, I encourage you to reply to this thread, open an issue on GitHub, or email
[email protected] - any information on the ownership of funds that is not known to be public will be kept confidential (but you probably want to email me if that's the case).
ChangelogJune 24, 2024New page to list the last 500 losses incurred by miners (claiming less fees/block subsidy than allowed, duplicate coinbase tx, genesis coinbase) at
https://burned.money/transactions/coinbaseJune 18, 2024ATOM feeds added at
https://burned.money/feeds