My write-up, and I'm about three months late to the news - but this rabbit hole proved super interesting.
I've dug into how 1111...oLvT2 is actually constructed, why there's no known key for it, and what the five addresses were doing beforehand: one of them sent its entire balance to a P2SH address in March and got almost exactly the same amount back three weeks later.
Also a toy in there that generates real key pairs against the burn address, if you fancy your odds at 10^48!
Just for completeness, miners can permanently destroy bitcoins without creating an output by collecting less than the permitted block reward.
That’s a fair point! I’ve added a sentence to section 5 for completeness. Thanks Murch.
one address sends its whole balance out and gets almost exactly the same back three weeks later, that's someone staging the burn address before trusting it. and the 10^48 toy makes the 'maybe someone has the key' cope measurable