2,609 bitcoin were sent to a public-key hash of zero. How do you unlock a hash that no key can produce?
In 2011 someone — researchers point at Mt. Gox — paid thousands of bitcoin to a P2PKH script whose HASH160 payload is the number 0.
The appearance
The locking script is the ordinary P2PKH template — OP_DUP OP_HASH160 <payload> OP_EQUALVERIFY OP_CHECKSIG — except the payload is 0, not a 20-byte hash. HASH160 always returns 20 bytes. No public key, hashed, equals the integer zero. The outputs are unspendable, and they still sit in the UTXO set because they are not OP_RETURN.
Case file sealed
Investigation notes, the reconstruction, and sources sit behind this seal. Open it when you have sat with the raw transaction.
Open the case file
The investigation
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01 Who did this
A 2019 paper in Frontiers in Blockchain (Bistarelli et al.), extending earlier measurements, found this distortion concentrated in 2011 and pointed at a Bitcointalk thread attributing it mainly to Mt. Gox. Exchange hot-wallet software of that year assembled scripts by hand more often than anyone would like to remember.
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02 The cost
2,609.36304319 BTC. At the time, on the order of $8,000. In 2026, on the order of $200 million. They are not 'lost keys' in the usual sense — there is no key to find. They are a type error, immortalised.
Reconstruction
A malformed P2PKH: the 20-byte hash was replaced with zero, probably by exchange software writing an empty or integer field into a script template. Mathematics will not invert HASH160 to zero, so the coins are burned. Mt. Gox is the leading attribution; the chain itself only records the scripts.