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Comment by 8organicbits | Hacker News Reader

In all likelihood this is someone burning their BTC. Proof of burn can be used to convert funds, so this money may not be lost, although I don't think any other cryptocurrency uses that burn address. Technically someone may have the key for that address, and could spend those funds, but that's widely doubted.

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How exactly is BTC not lost when it is sent to an inactive person that is possibly not alive?

That money is by all probability lost, and this transaction looks at best like a weird flex, or an unlikely attempt to prove some connection to satoshi.

What would burning achieve?

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/proof-burn-cryptocurren...

but this link specifically says bitcoin does not use proof of burn?….

What the article means is that the bitcoin protocol does not have an official way to burn coins. But if you need to burn coins, you could very well send them to an address you know is inactive and lost manually.

PoB is to obtain mining power, according to the article. How would transferring BTC to Satoshi confer any kind of mining power? Or what did the person who transferred the BTC gain from it? that’s what I do not understand, what’s the benefit?

One of the earliest examples of proof of burn that I can remember was around 2013 where counterparty was selling the first (?) tokens using the bitcoin network. Their application used an invalid multi-sig address to send your bitcoin to that would effectively burn it as there would never be a private key that could spend it (can't remember the full details here). Addresses that sent money in would then have tokens available to use on their application layer.

I believe this is actually where the term was first coined as well. What it means now I'm not sure, don't follow crypto.

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