Why is 1111111111111111111114oLvT2 used as the burn address?

#1

The address 1111111111111111111114oLvT2 which apparently is the address you’d get if you the public key was all zeros has been used by this project since at least 2015.

Here is a related thread on Bitcointalk in which posters “discover” its use as the burn address for .id name registrations: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=237143.0;all

What is the background story behind why this specific burn address was chosen? Why is a burn address used in addition to OP_RETURN? @jude @muneeb @ryan do you remember?

#2

What is the background story behind why this specific burn address was chosen?

We thought it would be obvious that no one could possibly know the private key whose public key hashed to all 0’s. Calculating any value X such that ripemd160(sha256(X))) == 000...000 is computationally intractable.

Why is a burn address used in addition to OP_RETURN?

Not sure. When I was getting started in 2015, I didn’t know that you could send BTC to an OP_RETURN output, so that might have been the reason.

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