It is a Bitcoin address to which more than 13 bitcoins have been sent, but they will never be recovered. This is because the address does not have a private key associated with it, and therefore it is impossible to access the funds. Some think it is an experiment, a joke, or a way of burning bitcoins to reduce the supply and increase the price.
Well actually there are many associated private keys, but nobody in this universe will fine one.
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Not impossible, but yes very very low. Like so low that we humans don't intuitively get it. The stackexchange link probably points to the math.
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No, the address space is more of a "the sun will burn out before you could compute a negligible fraction of the addresses with all computing power on the planet" kinda scale.
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Here's an old Stack Exchange post
If you look at the addresses' activity you'll see that people are still actively sending bitcoin to this address, but coins are not moving out of it.
I assume there is a service out there that burns bitcoin to this address as part of its function.
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Note that this is generally considered a "bad" way to burn BTC, because it adds bloat to the UTXO set. The "good" way to burn BTC is using OP_RETURN outputs.
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How are you so certain there is no private key? Every address requires a private key. Unless you are saying they just typed the public address without knowing the private key?
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Exactly. They typed out a few words and calculated the required checksum at the end to make it a valid address.
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This address represents a P2PKH, so the hash160(public key) = 759d6677091e973b9e9d99f19c68fbf43e3f05f9. I don't understand the math well enough to know if there is a public key that satisfies that equation, but if there is, then a private key exists as well.
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