Bitcoin Forum

This article is written by Jimmy Song and was originally posted here : https://medium.com/@jimmysong/man-pays-50-btc-in-fees-please-help-5d161e8a75c6

One nightmare scenario for many of us when we’re sending bitcoins is putting in a wrong transaction fee and having that transaction mined. The fees would be lost and you would never see them again.

This happened to a person I know in this transaction: https://blockchain.info/tx/d38bd67153d774a7dab80a055cb52571aa85f6cac8f35f936c4349ca308e6380
Yes, he paid 50 BTC in fees and 1Hash.com mined the block back in January.

He posted all over reddit, tried to contact people, but unfortunately, due to his lack of technical prowess, he wasn’t able to figure out how to get his money back or how to prove that he sent the transaction.
He reached out to me during my show Off Chain. I just helped him sign this message:
Address : 1Acbo3viCYy1TSZB7m2W1nPPNF4rcAPMC9
Message : Please send back the money to : 1BJ5RoG7K84h3h99phZjUzLzAf6syNQkNm
Signature : HJyIIlA7hQ9WA+30Jx5oDwRvVD+sI6Odg0/fOnqTW+Hsfrau9dZfJ3twoqpmOetYvHEh4co53CziPuquLYO77Ps=
This is cryptographically verifiable and the address that the transaction inputs come from is clearly the one that signed this message.

He’s clearly the person that made the mistake. Can someone from 1hash.com help this man out?

This literally happened 9 months ago. You could have had a baby in the time it took to ask about this. Can you post some baby pictures please?  Why are you asking about this now?

hehehe that's funny. I posted about it because Jimmy wrote about it only yesterday. And also hoping maybe some one would be able to help this poor person somehow. I can only imagine how he must feel, after losing 50btc. I would never be able to move on. I would still be talking about it 9 years later. Lol

50 BTC back in January is a whole lot different than 50 BTC now. It's so cringy to think about it, I would assume he would have only tried harder during this time, as with each month the price surged and surged.

Did he manually enter a transaction fee of 50BTC or was it a bug in a software package?

How did this even happen? Was he drunk when he was sending out that transaction? I don't think the time of the transaction would matter, he's not getting his coins back even if it happened yesterday. I feel for him, but it seems like it was his own mistake.

You are soo right. I'm pretty sure every time the price goes up. All the hurt starts all over again and it becomes as if this happened yesterday. I really hope someone helps him.. I'm pretty sure that block can be traced back to exactly which miner mined the block with his transaction.

If that really happened 9 months ago. BTC price is $1000 more or less, 50 BTC is still a huge amount. I feel sorry for him. Hope he learned a lot from that experience. Transactions are irreversible, not sure if someone could actually help him.

 I feel sorry for him , but it's long time to discuses that and no thing can do .

Hahaha actually those 50 btc are more than $300k dollars, it is insane just paying that only for fees purposes, but anyway, there is nothing we can do to recover that because it has been mined 9 months ago, it is impossible mate. But it is not even your problem, why are you thinking about it? that poor man was handling more than $300 thousand dollars in his wallet and was not even aware of the fees that he put in there, it was his fault, not yours or from anyone.

Yes poor of him, maybe it was not much money 9 months before because bitcoin was more than 9x times cheaper than now (i guess) but it was still a huge amount of money, maybe more than $30,000 by those times.
but he was so dumb, how he could not look that he was sending 50 btc worth of fees? obviously that it was his fault, and i wonder if there is any way to recover those funds, but it is impossible since it was a long time ago.

Ya I heard about this but Jimmy Song made a tweet and mentioned it on his site that he's involved with so the public is aware and trying to get the company who mined it to give it back to him.

I remember this issue, it happened a long time ago and everybody was sad because of this poor guy, but i dont understand why you created a new topic in here because it has already been discused in here nine months ago when it got discovered on reddit.
yes, it is a sad story and i felt so sorry for that guy, just imagine how much money did he lost now that those bitcoins are more than $300 thousand dollars at the moment.

That is a very sad story. wondering how he made the mistake? In my opinion, ihash.com shall try to refund the BTC. But it may have split/distributed the mining reward to other miners. It is a tough one...

Given that this transaction occurred 9 months ago, the 9 BTC he kept is worth about as much as the 50 BTC he gave up in fees.

Jokes aside, how did Jimmy agree to pay such fees. Fees aren't blind to us. You agree to them or you do not.

I don't think that ihash.com wants to refund the bitcoin because that person is only buy the hash or something like that with the right amount and its not related with the fee. that man use the bigger fee to send the amount and I think if ihash.com wants to give refund, ihash.com only wants to give the amount he bought and ihash.com don't want to refund the fees because is not ihash.com mistake. 50 btc as a fee is a big amount for every body which is trying to earn bitcoin. yes I can imagine how frustrated he is now and I hope he can found a way to solve his stress.

I am not sure if this way is possible or not but another member named CIYAM was able to resolve this issue and in his case, the amount was 111 BTC.

* [Resolved] 111 BTC AS FEES (don't do raw tx's when you're tired) (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=135665.0).

However, asking for help after 9 months is a bit late for it and I see a very rare probability of getting positive results but still the person who made this mistake can give it a try.

But 50 BTC in January was also worth a lot, $50k, now it's 5 times more but still $50k is not a small amount.
And if I'm not wrong I think this was posted in the forum around that time, I think it was but I'm not sure. Anyways what's the point of posting this 9 months later?

He should ask for the help instantly within first 100 blocks at that time as most of the sites pay miners after 100 block confirmations but he didn't as the money was not that big and posting all this now doesn't make a difference as the site already paid to the miner and won't able to refund in any condition to that guy.

If you're gonna compare the bitcoin last January and the bitcoin this day. That is worth a lot. And that is so much to support yourself for the next year. Wow. That is a big loss imagine it will happen to me.

That has to be a disgusting loss for the man who paid that much fee to push the transaction. It's a miner's dream come true to see a transaction with 50 BTC as fee and of course would've grabbed it instantly to include it in the next block. Only if you were fast enough to make this post when the transaction happened, maybe 1Hash would've felt sorry for your friends and issued a partial refund or something along the lines.

They surely aren't bind to this but 50 btc as fees is a really big amount , i know if any of you may have received it you might not return but some people do care for others.

It's obviously manually there are some wallets which do allow you to set fees but wallets like coinbase , xapo also users to select the speed they want the transaction to be processed accordingly fees option is automatically provided by thess wallets. In this situation he used ihash.
If you read the post it seems it's a mistake from the person itself he signed a message asking the mining company to return his fees if possible.

that's a very bad mistake in the world of bitcoin transactions, the error is usually less accurate in checking the wallet address when shipping or maybe because your device is attacked by virus, I think your bitcoin will never return to your friend's wallet again, 50 bitcoin is a very large amount for now, it will be the shadow of your worst day, you will always think about it, what else when bitcoin prices always go like this month, be patient.

Wow. I couldn't imagine this. Normally though when you send a fee over a certain amount you it comes up with a warning. At least electrum does.