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Is it possible to provably make cryptocurrency tokens inaccessible?

cn flag

Would it be possible to generate an agreed upon public key that has no corresponding private key (maybe by using the latest few block hashes of a blockchain) and then send cryptocurrency to that account to provably make your tokens inaccessible?

If so, this would be a really easy way to implement cross-chain exchange of value.

fgrieu avatar
ng flag
It's possible to reserve a particular public key for a conventional purpose; or a particular bitstring that's the size of a public key, but not a valid one. Either is possible with ECDSA for secp256k1 that's common in bitcoin. If the cryptcurrency uses the words _public key_ to designate a hash of a true public key: designate by _reserved public key_ that hash of the reserved true public key. The rest is a matter of convention of the particular cryptocurrency, thus off-[topic](https://crypto.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic). Also this [meta](https://crypto.meta.stackexchange.com/q/985/555).
Zyansheep avatar
cn flag
@fgrieu Thanks for the comment! I thought my idea made sense (since public keys are derived from private keys), but I wanted to ask just to be sure. I wasn't completely sure whether this kind of question fit this subexchange, but I saw the cryptocurrency tag and read in the pop-up that "cryptographic mechanisms" were allowed.
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