Can POCKET tokens be burned?

Hello all, I am the creator of the Pocket protocol (see link at the bottom of the page), an experimental cryptocurrency/token that operates on the Steem blockchain. You can send people POCKET tokens or check your own balance by writing a comment that looks like this:

pocketsend:1@some-account, and then put whatever text you want after the comma.

That command would send 1 token to @some-account; if you wanted to send a different amount to some other account, just change the 1 and the account name.

POCKET tokens are also traded (as IOUs) on the Bitshares blockchain, see @pocketexchange about that. ^{Note: I do not operate the @pocketexchange service, and I'm not liable if their security practices cause you to lose tokens. Understand the risks before trading on any exchange!}

What's all this about burning?

At the moment, I don't know why you'd want to -- but what if you wanted to destroy a POCKET token? Could you do it? Yes, and there are a couple ways. The most robust, for sure, is to send tokens to the @null account. The @null account is a special account on Steem: @null cannot under any circumstances submit a transaction to the Steem blockchain. This is because it has no permissions. I got the following screenshot from steemd:

Its Owner, Active, and Posting permissions are all "locked," which just means that according to the rules of Steem, nobody can use this account for anything. The account's purpose is to burn stuff! If you send any STEEM or SBD to @null, those coins vanish into thin air, never to be spent again!

So if you wanted to destroy POCKET tokens, it's as simple as sending them to @null:

pocketsend:1@null, try this and see what happens!

Of course, nothing interesting will happen. You'll get a confirmation message from one of the Pocket bots that tells you @null's balance; that balance will be the cumulative number of tokens that have been burnt by sending them to @null.

Why would I want to do this?

My favorite use for burning tokens is the concept of "Proof of Burn" that Counterparty invented to do their ICO several years ago: rather than have people send them BTC to create the first XCP tokens, they had people burn BTC by sending them to the bitcoin address 1CounterpartyXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXUWLpVr:

The Counterparty protocol specified that every BTC that got sent to that address created some number of XCP tokens. It was an ICO whose purpose was to collect users who were committed-enough to the project to trash their BTC, rather than an ICO whose purpose was to collect a ton of free money. It had sort of a Quixotic purity to it that I always found very attractive.

Are you saying we should do a PoB with POCKET?

It would certainly be an interesting way for a new subtoken to launch on Steem. Would it be useful? That's entirely up to you and your purposes for your token. The downside of PoB is that it doesn't directly raise you money. The upside is that if you do it right, it can actually result in the creation of a valuable token (Counterparty is a great example), possibly without some of the regulatory headache you normally endure when running an ICO. ^{I realize that I might be 100% violently wrong on that point -- please consult with legal advice and your local regulatory bodies before you do this.}

If you do decide to do a PoB for some reason, you can happily use the @null account to do your burning. Or go create your own unspendable account with a sexier name and have people send tokens there.

As always, if you need a Bitshares account so you can trade POCKET IOU tokens issued by @virtualgrowth, you can sign up for Bitshares using this link.

For more information

• Trade POCKET on Bitshares
• Pocket Announcement Post
• Pocket Protocol Specification
• @biophil's Pocket Confirmer Github
• My meta-subchain post
• Dan's original post on subchains