Topic: Deleting crypto wallets with contents? (Read 267 times)

So they are technically a lost coin that helps with the further growth of bitcoin prices? That's what I was wondering too, why would someone burn their bitcoin? I don't find any good reason to burn your address besides being altruistic or you are burning someone's coins.

You can uninstall your wallet, delete the wallet file in your device but your coins will be on the network, in total supply. If you wipe out your private key, you will lose your coins and no one can get them. If they can not have access to your wallet file, brute force it, and so on.

Coins, when are launched, mined or minted, will exist on the network forever, if no burn actions are done.

Delete, uninstall a wallet is different than burning coins in an address.

what is the purpose of these actions?

There is no cryptocurrency in your wallet, so it will not disappear in case of erasion of your wallet.  You erroneously think of a crypto wallet as a sort of purse with banknotes sitting in it. In this sense, if you throw your purse away, it will certainly lead to a loss of your banknotes. Crypto wallets are not the same as physical wallets. Basically, crypto wallet is software that helps you to access your funds in a blockchain. Yeah, your funds are a part of a blockchain, they're sitting there and waiting for you to move them. Or you can "hodl" them, it doesn't matter. You have keys to access your coins, your "safety deposit box" but in the blockchain. For simplicity, we can use the following analogy: the banking mobile app provides access to the funds on your bank account. Deleting the app will not delete your funds and your bank account. All information is stored in the bank's database, so the only thing you need to access it is your login and password. The same applies to crypto wallets, but the way to unlock your "account" is slightly different. Instead of a login/password combination like it is in the banking app, we use special random keys called "private keys" or "seed phrase". These keys should be kept safe because they allow not only to move your coins but also to recreate the entire wallet.

I think deleting a crypto wallet is quite different from sending a coin to an address to burn the coin. If you create a wallet and have the private keys securely kept, then even if you delete the wallet, you can still access it whenever you want, so that means, deleting a crypto wallet with Bitcoin in it, doesn't make the Bitcoin left in it to disappear. On the other hand, I don't know much about Bitcoin burn, but I know a lot of altcoins can be sent to an address to burn them and remove them from circulation which in some cases might increase the price, thus why we hear a lot about altcoins token burn. Many people who have misplaced their wallet at one point in time or the other, have tried to recover it through their private keys, thus, in as much as your private keys are still intact, your Bitcoin in that wallet will always be there. Hence, those crypto wallets you used for crypto faucets, if they have a private keys, you can try importing them to access your Bitcoin.

As Satoshi himself once said,

"Sigh... why delete a wallet instead of moving it aside and keeping the old copy just in case?  You should never delete a wallet."

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.15136

As long as you have or you remember the keys it will not considered to be lost forever unless you forget all details of your wallet. If accounts of crypto faucets I think the support has the power to give you instructions to recover or tell you that it cannot be restored.

Purposely lost the wallet or not, the bitcoins stored in that wallet will just stay there forever and burned if doesn't recovered and doesn't move. But I doubt that you'll not regret it to recover if tons of bitcoins are stored in that wallet. Transactions are irreversible and you cant actually get your bitcoin without reaccessing the wallet with your own private keys.

There are some situations that a user threw away their computer with a btc wallet on it, or a scenario wherein they forgot the private keys, etc.

Your asset to be Not Liquid and is in between 78% of the Bitcoin Supply is Not Liquid, this means you will be a standing man who has creating the decrease a market supply. you also had an achievement to create the rising price, congratulation.

Yes, you can delete your Bitcoin wallet whatever you want but it will never delete the address that you generated on the blockchain, it will remain there, and also your balance will be traceable on the address that you have generated. 

I tend to agree above, this is like burning coins that never access or something you forgot the keys and never access, or when the owner will die and the wallet can't access by anyone.  This is the same scenario.

If you're afraid of being hack or afraid that you are using crypto, you can delete your wallet but if you want to get it back, you can keep the key and password in any place that you can have access, time will come if you need it, you still have access.  Of course, a wallet that has the open-source feature.

If you are going to delete a wallet with bitcoin. inside it then that bitcoin that is ni that wallet will never be used again because the wallet cannot access anymore, some people think that the bitcoin will also get deleted but that is not true
 I also do the same thing when I got so many wallets installed on my device to the point that I almost forgot one's password.

You can delete the wallet by accident but as long as you hold private keys or mnemonic phrases for that wallet, you can still have an access. The best way of burning it is to send it to those wallets that are no longer being used and no one has access on it which will make the bitcoins sent on it totally lost forever.
An example of that burn address for bitcoin is this.
https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/1CounterpartyXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXUWLpVr
This thread is a good discussion about burn addresses which is the source of that address that I've linked.

This is the same scenario if a bitcoiner die by accident without telling to its heirs its private keys or recovery seed, so no one will get access to that bitcoins he own, and those coins are lost for good.

The difference is just you want to get rid of those bitcoins.

They will not disappear but you will not be able to move them any more. Transactions information related to your wallet are stored on the blockchain and there is no way to delete them from there.
Technically, what you need to access your coins and spend them is the private keys generated by your wallet not the wallet itself.
To be 100% sure you/anyone else won't be able to access those coins anymore (although I don't know why you want to do such thing), better send them to a burn address like this one 1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE

Wallets do not hold or store the funds in your address, rather they are tools you use to access it. In simple terms, your Bitcoins (or any other cryptocurrency) are representations on the blockchain with public keys which you can use to check the balance and transaction history or to sign new transactions.

If you use electrum wallet for example and have an address on it with some Bitcoins, deleting the wallet software doesn't delete the coins as well. With a backup of the phrase you can always recover it. Of course if there is no backup seed phrase and the wallet file is deleted, there's no other way to spend the coins in it.

i do same as you do when no transferable amount to send , especially nowadays there is dozen wallet on playstore and appstore that airdrop and bounty manager tell the bounty hunter to use one of those. and yes like ranochigo said the money will gone actually the money still exist but you can use it since you dont have the private key

Yes, they'll be burned and no one else will ever have access to it.

It's not a provable burn though, so outsiders can only assume with some doubt that those funds were abandoned and lost.

What if I delete a crypto wallet that still has a bit of crypto in it? For example, will the Bitcoins left in a wallet I would delete disappear forever, never to return into cirulation? (I actually did this a few times already, except that they were accounts of crypto faucets....)