Announcement: We made some changes to the protocol and the client: now burns don’t require the use of
OP_RETURN, and we’re no longer pushing transactions through Eligius, which seems to now be rejecting anything with such an output. This means that 1) a bunch of bugs have been fixed, 2) the only Counterparty transaction that will work on mainnet until Bitcoind 0.9 comes out is a burn, 3) burns are much faster, and 4) it is
theoretically possible for burns to be made with a regular Bitcoin client.
We’re not currently recommending that anyone use anything other than
counterpartyd to burn. The format of a Counterparty transaction
is very specific, and we can’t guarantee that a transaction constructed by any other software will work (and if it doesn’t, you’ll lose your BTC).
For those interested, the protocol will recognise as a valid burn any transaction with the following characteristics:
- All of the input addresses are identical.
- The address of the first output is the unspendable address '1CounterpartyXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXUWLpVr' (mainnet) or 'mvCounterpartyXXXXXXXXXXXXXXW24Hef' (testnet).
- The total number of BTC burned by the source address is less than or equal to 1.
Instructions on how to use a Blockchain.info wallet to construct a burn should be forthcoming. The
burn functionality of counterpartyd will continue to work as it has been doing, and
of course previous burns remain valid.