Bitcoin Forum

I was looking at the stats and noticed that the transaction fee was at 100btc even though the number of transaction on that day was just a slight increase compared to the day before. It wasn't the highest though but I believe it has been quite some time though since we last seen that during the Mt Gox era

Just wondering what might have caused that because the first thing that comes to my mind was somebody accidentally or wrongly inserted the decimal point when adjusting the sending fees when performing transaction.

http://s3.postimg.org/a00wlzpf7/Untitled.png

Probably this: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/33u2id/help_losing_over_85_btc_because_of_bitgos_flawed/

Damn! that is harsh and very very big issue .
It's nice to see that the fee will be returned but that really scares the shit out of me .
I will not touch the custom fee adding function ever

Same here. Its really great of bitman to work out with the guy to get most of his money back, even though it was not their error. See we have some good people left in bitcoin!

Now when we witness this issue I think I could be a huge problem. Therefore I thought that there should be an option to limit custom transaction fee in every wallet options to prevent such huge losses.
Transaction fee should be limited to 1 BTC max imo. Larger fees should be only possible when you tinker with advanced options and enable it yourself.
But I honestly have no idea why anyone would want to add more than minimum as a  fee.

A very nice silver lining story. :D

At first I supposed that instead of 100mbtc they wrongly insert 100btc...
anyway, good they recovered those funds

In the Bitcoin community - it is easy to find lots of scamming assholes.  BitMain is not one of them.  BitMain has always been 100% awesome.  Especially in mining.  Nearly every mining manufacturer turned out to be a royal scam - only BitMain consistently delivers precisely what/when they say they will.  

BitMain rocks!

I think Hashnest also belongs to bitmain. It always worked, always gave out right payout and they actually own the hardware lf the cloud miners. Bitmain is not a SCAMMING COMPANY!

Well wouldn't this be essentially be robbing the miners who are mining on their pool? My understanding of a pool's relationship with the mining utilizating their pool is that the pool is to distribute all of the mining revenue (including tx fees) to all of the miners with the amounts being distributed being based on the payout method. Just because someone makes a mistake in creating a transaction does not mean that the miners are not entitled to all of their income.

Although it is very clear in this case that the size of the TX fee was a mistake, it is difficult to draw the line between TX fee that is intended to get the transaction confirmed quickly and an erroneous transaction. As per the Bitcoin protocol the transaction was valid so IMO the sender should bear the cost of their mistake, be held accountable, and learn their lesson.

Bitmain is a SOLID company, let no one tell you different.

The guy got his funds back, VERY luck, and awesome play by the pool...

I double this.
I got some of their Ants at different dates and everysignle time got AAA customer service and super fast shipping time, which is important for RIO.

This guy is really lucky to receive his money back, Bitmain good job :)

Firstly this was not an user mistake. The user in question "uncovered" a bug the worst way possible, by having to face its problematic issues. According to reddit they have been issued a 25 BTC bug bounty on top of the returned payment. It apparently was an overflow[1] in the BitGo API.

Most pools act in a similar fashion when a mistake happens and yes this happens quite often. Several times a year I think. This is probably something pools should have in their ToS if they have any. I think its the morally correct thing to do and returning the fee is an overall win for BinMain, just see the reactions in this thread and how it affected their public stance. Now imagine they would have kept the funds. I think its very likely that many miners would have changed the pool even though they profited from the "mistake".


[1] https://np.reddit.com/comments/33u8vq//cqofrit

This guy is really lucky to get his coins back.
They could have went to another pool that wouldn't care or even one of those unknown IP address miners.

Wow! a 25 btc bounty ?
Now i feel like i should have been that guy but than again , i don't have that big amount anyway :D

Well the term "user" is being used in respect to to the fact that someone somehow caused a tx to be signed and broadcast that included such large fee. The fact that a program had a "bug" verses a user erroneously somehow manually created such transaction is a moot point IMO.

There are legit reasons why someone would want to include a large (although probably not this large) tx fee when a large tx fee is not necessary per current standards, examples would include when a loan is due by a certain block number, there is an unusually large number of unconfirmed txs in the mempool, an usually long time between blocks at a given point in time (this would go hand in hand with a large number of unconfirmed txs), your private keys are compromised by someone with a large amount of mining power (even if nodes would reject a double spend tx, as long as the tx is unconfirmed they can include a double spend in a block they find), other miscellaneous reasons to want to double spend an unconfirmed tx among other reasons.

I would agree that pools should include in their TOS that under a strict set of guidelines that an erroneous TX fee will be returned to the spender. I also agree that this positively affects bitmain's public reputation.

One addition problem that returning funds causes is that it is difficult to know where to return the funds to. I believe in this case there was only one output address (eg no change address) although most of the time this will not be the case (and in some cases there may be more then two outputs for a variety of reasons). Add this to the fact that the "sending" address cannot always be reasonably determined by looking at the blockchain, and even when you think you can accurately determine the "sending" address you will be incorrect (although I believe this to be very rare).

Above the above issues you have the fact that a "receiving" address would only benefit someone for a certain period of time. One example of this is bitmixer - I believe they only agree to forward funds to their customers that are received within a certain amount of time, and if a pool were to send funds after this time has expired then they might not receive benefit from funds being returned anyway.

While I think in the vast majority of cases it is appropriate to return excess funds that you were not owed, I think there are too many unknowns when dealing with a pool in this regard.

also a lot of the people posting here don't actually have an option, they are just spamming their signatures

Good to see that the user got its funds back. I always put custom tx fee whenever I make a transaction, and so far I haven't experienced the same. Reading the thread, it seems that there is a bug on the API and the user who made the "mistake" ended up receiving more than what the cost is. Pretty good outcome. :)

Yep it was probably that dude, but all went good for him since he received his coins back. BitGo messed something with their encryption tool and caused this transaction spike.

Yup, that is indeed insane. That's why my paranoia is good in a way, because if I need to do a big transaction (and I wish I had that kind of money to worry about things like this) I would never send 100 BTC at once, but in batches, or at least do a initial small transaction to see that everything is in order.

I wouldnt call that a moot point. Consider you have some sort of cold storrage and a programm to wipe everything on there to an address you provided. The programm returns: k, did it, here is the transaction for you to broadcast. Unless you suspect something to go wrong you have no reason to manually decode the raw transaction (or get another tool for it) to make sure its what you want. Whether it was a user misstake for not checking something that is displayed on screen or a bug that is not something the user can check is a big difference IMHO.


Granted, there are certainly cases where miners could reasonably argue that returning the fee is not an option. All incidents I am aware of had a fee way over 1 BTC though and that certainly is not a case of I want the TX to be confirmed fast.


I agree a payout should never be done lightly and the person requesting a refund should at the very least be able to provide a signed message.


Agreed and this should be done by hand as well to avoid some of the problems you addressed.

I took a quick look into the AntPool board but I was unable to find a miner complain. IIRC the last incident was with GHash.io and they return the payment out of their own pocket. Thus the miners had a larger reward and the person got their high fee back.


But you would not have gotten the 25 bug bounty then ;)

I think it was just a very random occurrence because the devs did not notice the bug was not fully patched for months. Bitman and bitgo handeled the situation very well. +1 for both those companies. I wonder how scared the poor guy was

This has been discussed before.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1038484.0

Yeah its pretty scary so imagine if you are even newer then you to bitcoin software.  The mainstreamers aren't ready to take responsibility for these type of mistakes they could make and would have a shit fit.

WOW! 100BTC fee.

I am willing to bet that the sender must have cried when he saw that,
his heart beating very fast, feeling despair for a while.

He was lucky the miners were good people.

That looks to be the case but really if it were me who lost 100 BTC in fee. I don't even know what would have i done with , first thing i know i might be dead with a heart attack as per my age. :D :D :D
Good thing i don't deal with high amounts of Bitcoin

yeah, i noticed that a few days ago, but I think he has the refund now, bitmain pool is doing the correct thing, I just wonder why this guy pay 100 btc mining fee, shouldn't be defauct 0.0001btc fee?? :o