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Comment by earlz | Hacker News Reader

I actually had to address this in the altcoin world (back when that was a thing) because the C-CEX exchange would take money for "destroying" coins, but the method they used for destroying coins was just taking a video of them sending a wallet to the private key owned by a different wallet and then deleting the wallet. (which they could've easily kept a backup of). There were even some altcoin devs that paid me to hardfork their coin to ensure that coins sent to the address the exchange used could no longer be spent on the network.

Anyway, it's not the "good" OP_RETURN method, but to send your coins from any altcoin to a provably impossible address I made a utility and print out of addresses for sending to "an address owned by the public key hash of 0" http://earlz.net/view/2014/10/22/0340/provably-spendable-alt...

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> because the C-CEX exchange would take money for "destroying" coins

Who would use such a service?

Heh, I guess I forgot how weird things look from the outside.. but no one knew how to properly destroy coins, or that there was even a proper way. Despite there being all these altcoin "Developers", 95% of them only actually knew how to copy-paste-search-replace to create a new altcoin.. The focus in altcoins was always the marketing side: pretty graphics, good branding, and a viral community that expands until it implodes on itself.

So yea, people used it because they didn't know better.. And because of how backwards the altcoin community is, most of the time it's the inexperienced people asking other inexperienced people for help.. so bad habits spread very quickly and pervasively

What were common reasons to want to destroy coins? I can't think of very many scenarios, and then you'd probably need something more reliable.

The most common need was that many altcoins would start off with a large premine, and then they would offer an IPO/ICO/CFC (depending on the time, the term for this would change to be whatever was least likely to get the SEC's attention) where they basically put all the coins on an exchange or with an escrow and make it so that people can buy the coins in exchange for bitcoin. If they don't sell out of the altcoin's supply, then the developers are left with a number of coins. These coins are typically destroyed so that the only supply is owned by people who bought into it.

That problem isn't destroying coins though, it is verifying that coins have been destroyed. A person can destroy them easily, verifying that someone else is destroying them is hard.

The whole situation you described is completely ridiculous though, because instead of 'destroying' coins the developers could have distributed their own coins to all other addresses proportionately based on balance.

The whole thing is an obvious scam from top to bottom, but I'm not surprised any more that some people would take the bait.

if you give out free coins you are decreasing the value of your coin. if you destroy them, you are theoretically increasing the value.

since the popularity and value of these things are very correlated, it makes way more sense to destroy. Who is going to spend real currency on a coin that is losing value day 1 because everyone has coins to sell?

If you give out coins exactly proportional to balance the value per coin has changed, but hasn't changed the distribution. It's like multiplying all balances by 100, it's just a unit change.

Early developers pre-mining coins during development, coins need to be mined to test that the altcoin actually works but it's really unfair if the developers start off with a ton of coins because they mined blocks before it went public.

Satoshi did this but I don't think any of his BTC has ever been moved from his wallet.

Can't you test your mining on a different fork of the chain?

I think the idea is to make your altcoins instantly have value by transferring the value from the bitcoins to your altcoins.

Kind of like if I decided to use pine cones as a new currency, I could try to convince you by literally burning dollar bills and telling you their value had moved into those pine cones.

That's how I'm reading it at least.

The blog post seems to be missing the full PGP signature.

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