Bitcoin Forum

https://blockchain.info/tx/a2d1e19331f4ea274079c94382560bbb4f32165ed647a33adad651a604e7caa2

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1syu3h/i_lost_all_my_bitcoins_in_an_erroneous/

 :o

lol, what a fool.

NAsty!

Poor guy, I feel bad for him... :(

A fool and his bitcoins are easily parted

No wonder my last p2pool payout was almost double what I'd expected.

damnn my feelings are with that guy xDD

Evil  ;)

Some people are just not up to the challenge of handling their money responsibly.  :-\

This guy really really really really.....really wanted his lottery ticket really, really quickly.  ;D

Last time, AsicMiner returned 200 BTC fee, but this time it is P2PPool. :(

Funny how we are split between sympathy and .... whatever the opposite of sympathy is.

People need to learn how to treat their bitcoins with respect. Clicking is a lot easier than handling real cash. Its not like anyone ever went into a restaurant, paid for a $10 meal, and left a $3000 tip.

Feel bad for him. P2pool miners must be so happy now.  ;D

Interesting ...... let's see how it plays out. AsicMiner are cool, but I would say that, I have shares in them.

damn....

would be nice to know exactly how me managed to pay a 20BTC fee...

i mean wow, how to you accidently set your TX fee to 20BTC ???


make a note to add some idiot proof error checking for clients bitcoin devs.

seriously, i can only imagine how many poeple sent the wrong amount of bitcoin to an address, and lost funds :-\

Yeah, I was wondering that. Guess there must be a field in the software to "enter your own transaction fee".

But you are right. It should give a warning, preferably two, or even an error ......... "you are about to do something entirely stupid - (Y)es or (N)o" ?

It sounds like he created the transaction using brainwallet.org from a brain wallet address to the payee address without a change address. So there is 20.199BTC input and 0.05271705 BTC output.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transactions#Output

this is infact what happened



talk about an expensive lesson  :D

The good news is, his transaction must have been confirmed by the network really fast! The bad news is, bitcoin is still a long ways from becoming an acceptable currency for the mainstream, given that horrific scenarios like this can play out.

This posts sums it up nicely:

The number of Forever Alone, Neckbeard, Failed English Major Beta Males on Reddit sickens me.

Well grandma wouldn't try to be stupid enough to manually create a tx by hand.  She would use a wallet either a wallet program or an eWallet and neither make these kind of mistakes because they are written by people who actually know what they are doing.

If you want to create tx by hand you are working at the functional layer, like programming in machine language, or manually constructing binary TCP/IP packets.  If you program in machine machine language you can cause all kinds of problems too.  Based on that your conclusion would likely be that grandma can never use facebook because machine language is dangerous.

I believe the word you are looking for is schadenfreude.

It sucks for him, but the reality is you need to be educated, responsible and careful with your coins.  Otherwise you will eventually be separated from them.  Its a shame for him to lose his whole stack, but given the amount of care used here it was probably only a matter of time before they would have been lost to an investment scam or gambled away.  Different recipients same result.

A excessive fee warning in the client would be nice too.

This website should be changed to default to sending the change back to the original address.  There is no reason to default to sending the change as a tx fee.

It's simple to call it an idiot mistake from atop your ivory tower, but if a bitcoin "enthusiast" (we are still in the early adopter phase, afterall) can manage a colossal fuck up on the scale of blowing $20,000 USD worth of bitcoin, then there is a problem with the bitcoin ecosystem. There is no equivalent to this in real life. You would never accidentally leave a $20k tip at a restaurant, or accidentally overpay $20k for your Starbucks frappacino.

Your car analogy is flawed. This is why: we have been using cash and credit cards for years, each have provided great utility to consumers. Like I said above, there is essentially no room for massive fuck ups, and even if your money is stolen somehow, you typically have recourse.

It would be like if supercharged motorbikes from the present were suddenly introduced to denizens of the world of a distant future Earth, where all cars traveled at 200 mph and were automated so that accidents were a thing of the distant past.

Now you give them these bikes which can be crashed, and the people, without adequate knowledge or proper concern for their personal safety and that of others are cut loose. Of course they'll have accidents, and for what point, ultimately?

If you guys want bitcoin to succeed, it will need to be idiot proofed. Nobody is going to convert their cash to a protocol that allows them and their friends to potentially lose their life savings to some momentary lapse of judgement!

Sums it up. He couldn't be arsed to read what was on his screen.

Hence the need for "protection from ourselves and our grandmas". Several confirmations, even complete rejection of transactions where the transaction fee is disproportionately large. Makes sense.

It has nothing to do with the bitcoin protocol, but the problem of the client software. Any reasonable client should at least warns the user about this error, or better forbids the tx fee to be higher than a certain value.

The brainwallet.org transactions are not supposed to be used by ordinary users at all, and they should put a big warning there. It's used to generate something like 'raw transactions', not used for daily BTC transactions.

Yeah I love credit cards as a merchant. People buy stuff off you then charge back. Nearly put me out of business two times. You aren't getting any sympathy from me with that angle.

Sure, the software needs to get better. But the guy has to take some responsibility for his own actions. He didn't have a gun to his head as far as I know.

I hope the pool pays the transaction fees back though. Nothing like the world thinking of bitcoiners as a bunch of immoral scammers to kill the concept.

Yes, that default behavior is just ridiculous. Wait until more people start redeeming paper- and brain wallets. Expect to see a lot more stories like this.

This is not good PR for bitcoin at all - Some type of 'maximum fee' principle by nodes might be more reasonable, with obviously erroneous fees returned to the input instead?

It does send change back to the source address.

Actually what appears to have happened is that the user got caught by a UI bug. Assuming he used this page - http://brainwallet.org/#tx - if you change the figure next to the destination address the json transaction updates and the appropriate change is sent back to the source address. But if you change the source amount the transaction does not update meaning you end up paying more as fees.

So it's the bug of brainwallet.org, and nothing to do with the bitcoin.

In other words, the software is crap, and should be called out as such. We don't need such amateur software ruining the reputation of bitcoin

That's correct, but it's not unthinkable that sometime in the future, nodes could invalidate obviously erroneous transactions (like 20btc fees or unspendable outputs for example).

Extensive error controls exist in all other financial transaction systems. No properly architected commercial system would ever pass through things like this.

20 BTC fees maybe, but unspendable outputs no. How can the mining nodes know which output is unspendable?

Even for the 20 BTC fee, I still think the restriction should be done in the client side. The mining node has no reason to forbid people to pay 20BTC fees, and maybe the user just want to ensure the transaction to be included in a block as soon as possible.

It's like if we leave $1000 in the table of a restaurant, any reasonable waiter will warn us, but he will accept as the tip it if you insist. There's no reason to establish a law to forbid any tip larger than $100.

Sure we don't need a law. but if someone mistakenly tipped you $1000 at a restaurant, would you give it back? Maybe not ........ but then a restaurant isn't risking the whole reputation of what we hope is a major world currency.

Actually last time Asicminer did return the 200 BTC tx fee. I think most reputable miners will return the fee, but this time unfortunately the block is mined by the P2PPool and this makes things much more complicated.

These websites really should not be exposing the technical innards of bitcoin to random people.  Also, "brainwallets" should die in a fire.

And as a lesson to everyone watching, always run your raw transactions through a decoder before you sign it.  Hopefully one smart enough to look up the inputs and warn you if you are about to make a huge mistake.

????
Only 20?
i this its a mistake

This will give some Bitcoin haters enough material to start ranting about how imperfect the system this.
But hopefully it will also educate some people on how to use it , and to double check what they do if unsure of it.

It's not the system but his choice of wallet.
Ido feel sorry for him and his lost.
20 coins to may 100s be on their way to him.
and to me too :)  :P

When you spend from a brainwallet, you must spend ALL your funds. The difference goes into the fee.

Too bad for him.... 20 BTC is 18,000 USD at today's rate. 

uhhh i feel bad for this kid, hope he has enough left. That was nearly a 18k move.....  and lost them all 

This is a perfect example of someone who doesn't understand Bitcoin enough to work with it. I he learned something from this.

You have no idea if this person is a "bitcoin enthusiast". You have just made a baseless assumption because you believe us to be in the "early adopter" phase. The two things wouldn't necessarily be linked even if they were both true.

Many people have accidentally lost money if they try to transmit it themselves. If I opted to withdraw my funds as cash, and walk them to China, I would probably lose them. Whereas if I had just used the nice software my bank provided I might not (have such a high chance of) losing them.

As many people have pointed out, unfortunately, this person was not using any good wallet software. This would be similar to me trusting a new nigerian payment processor as my bank - not a great idea.

Brainwallet is lambasted constantly by anybody reasonably knowledgable because human beings CANNOT CHOOSE RANDOM PASSPHRASES. The number of people who have lost their funds due to brainwallets being hacked is huge. But people will not search google and will not perform due dilligence with their own money, which, yes, is something you (currently) have to do to use bitcoin safely.

Now I know that this person's brainwallet was not hacked, but he obviously did not research properly bitcoin protocol and security as if he had he would not be using one. Would YOU really send $20,000 to a string of numbers you had just printed from a random webpage you found on the internet without knowing much about it.

The bitcoin PROTOCOL does not need to be idiot-proofed. There should be no idiots reading/using that. That (unfortunately) was the issue here. Services (for example wallets) have and will continue to be built on top of the protocol to facilitate end-users' safety.

That said, I do feel terrible for this guy/gal's loss. That is a serious amount of money, and after seeing ASICMiner step up and return some previous errors of this size it is a massive shame that P2Pool mined that block. Hopefully some people on freenode will return some funds if he signs a message or something.

/rant

Just don't let Grandma use Brainwallet  :D.

Poor guy, they should start making some fool proof wallets.  ::)

I once waited 2 HOURS for a transaction of 1 satoshi even though i paid a fee of like 1 mBTC  :o

Mining could be more profitable thanks to brainwallet.

This it is the equivalent of your bank allowing you to construct a wire transfer packet manually and then someone getting surpised that instead of wiring $1,000 to grandma they wired $10,000 to some unknown account in a bank in the Caymans.

Actually, ... I remember hearing once of a waitress who was left a huge tip by a generous couple so she could afford to go to school (I don't remember the exact detail).

There must be some way to develop a system where this type of thing won't be allowed to happen.  It's things like this that hurt the credibility of BTC in the public's eyes - I mean what if that happened when BTC is way more popular, years from now, I could see that Yahoo headline story now :)

A lot of pools (BTC Guild, Slush, ASICMINER, Ozcoin, Eligius) have returned massive fee errors in the past.  But...now all those pools pay txfees to the miners except for ASICMINER (since they're not a pool, just a huge solo miner).  So it's time to start being more careful with raw transactions, since the pools are no longer keeping txfees, meaning expecting them to return these amounts will either require them to claw it back from miners (which will hurt their business as a result) or pay it from their own pocket for someone else's mistake.

A lot of wallets would flag this, but from what I read, the person was using a particular web site (http://brainwallet.org) which lets you create raw transactions.  He apparently wasn't paying attention to what he was doing and screwed up.  If he had imported his keys to the reference client, blockchain.info, electrum, Armory, Multibit etc, they would have flagged it. 

We don't have to prevent someone using a blowtorch to light a candle and setting the house on fire, if you don't know what you are doing, you use the appropriate tool.  The simple answer, is use a match. 

I feel bad for this guy, but it isn't a bitcoin protocol problem.  The tools are there, you just have to use them properly. 

I wouldn't use something allowing a raw transaction unless I was on the test net.

This will give some Bitcoin haters enough material to start ranting about how imperfect the system this.
But hopefully it will also educate some people on how to use it , and to double check what they do if unsure of it.

That hurts.

I do not know the specifics of the payout protocol of P2Ppool, but couldn't they simply send him the coins back in a great display of altruism?

The fee was distributed among 399 miners, would be difficult to contact all of them:
https://blockchain.info/tx/3178271edbc74f77eb507415e130d7ddd72cd2bb1f6817a2a4101c9d9c51e90c

Difficult but not impossible.  Real altruism takes effort.

Some miners have given back mistakenly sent fees before I think. Maybe he can get some coins back.

This happened last week, on LTC
http://www.reddit.com/r/litecoin/comments/1smypy/update_huge_thanks_to_litecoinpool_huge_thanks_to/

shouldnt be gambling with bitcoins....       >:(

Friendly reposting of
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=373807.0

Send them to me next time.  ;D

CLick Click Click, weeza all gunnna be rich!

Dude learned a valuable lesson. and costly one at that.

Jesse Livermore an old speculator in the 1900's would lock himself in a JP morgan vault with his 100's of millions once a year to tally his totals for the year so that he knew that he was actually trading something that had value and not just points on a piece of paper.

He commited suicide broke and penniless in the end so I guess it all comes out in the wash anyhow.

Damn I feel for the dude I lost .068 btc cause of my stupid ass trying to use satoshidice and I didn't realize that they had a minuim fee somehow I sent all of my btc .

currency of the future!

That the lesson

I keep telling you - divide your bitcoins across different services/exchanges/wallets and you will be spared these dumb mistakes

Yes I try to do this as well. I get nervous Ben sending tc worth a couple hundred dollars. It all seems very new and almost anything seems like it can happen in the btc world. At least for now while it's newer

That sucks so badly all of his money in that fee :-\

Note to self, never use brainwallet

The person who did this transaction fee shows himself

Here
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=373807.0

and Here
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1t1nvl/i_accidentally_sent_a_brainwallet_transaction/

Yes it was due to a brainwallet issue

The particular miner has no incentive to reject.  The other miners have a slight incentive to reject since it helps protected the reputation of the protocol and it's not like they get the fees for that particular transaction.

It could be implemented as a soft fork.  Transactions are invalid if the fee is to large by some definition.  If more than 75% of the inputs are paid to fees, then the transaction should be rejected.

Or just double check you don't send a 20BTC transaction fee.