0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 address behaviour

Question

I have a question about the possibly strange behaviours of address: 0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000

We know that:

• ETH + ERC20 tokens sent there are burnt
• Upon creation of a new smart contract, a transaction towards that address is to be issued
• That there should be no owner of the private key of that address
• It should not be an EOA (externally owned address)

Question:

• How can tokens be sent OUT from this address as seen here:

https://etherscan.io/address/0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000#tokentxns

• How could it be that this address has mined several blocks and uncles

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

ETH + ERC20 tokens sent there are burnt

Effectively. Unless someone generates the private key, in which case they'll take ownership of those funds. Note that you could pick any other unused address as a burn address, it's just people seem to have used 0x0 (and various others) as Schelling points.

That there should be no owner of the private key of that address

There's no way of proving this or preventing it from happening in future. It's just very, very unlikely.

It should not be an EOA (externally owned address)

Again, it's possible that someone could generate the private key for an EOA that equates to this address.

How can tokens be sent OUT from this address as seen here:

These are minting or burning events, rather than transactions.

More details here: Why Transfer(0x0, _to, _amount) after Minting Tokens

How could it be that this address has mined several blocks and uncles

Almost certainly a miner that has incorrectly configured their etherbase to be 0x0.

(See: Is it possible for the miner of a block to be address 0x0?)