Bitcoin Forum

Hi community,
I have made the worst mistake of my life and I am here asking for help of any kind.

A couple of hours ago I was selling 2.8 bitcoins to a guy and made the mistake in the blockchain.info wallet of fill the fields of bitcoins amount and transaction fee inverted. The result is a transaction of 0.0003 btcs with a fee of 2.8 btcs.

This is the transaction:
https://blockchain.info/es/tx/80477c3a1129cb81bc783d483999b0fa307c3f3398ce5b783475eac36b3bb0e0

GHash.IO found that block, I have the hope they could understand the situation and help me returning some bitcoins.

Those where the savings for live a couple of months.

Any other suggestions?


Thanks a lot

I thought the latest Bitcoin update had a fix to disallow such huge fees. Hope you get them back.

The only thing you can do is contact GHash.IO and hope that the pool operator is willing to help you.

There are no other suggestions possible.

Good luck.

I believe the Bitcoin Core reference client might have been changed so that it wouldn't allow you to create transactions like that.  However, he wasn't using Bitcoin Core.  He was using blockchain.info.

There is nothing that prevents peers from relaying such a transaction or miners from confirming such a transaction if you use a service that allows you to make the mistake.

People should probably contact blockchain.info support and ask them to implement a safety feature to prevent such mistakes ASAP.

If enough people contact them and demand such a feature, I suspect they will implement it pretty quickly.  It doesn't seem to be a very difficult thing to do.

I think Gash should do the right thing and return your coins.

This is an opportunity for them to look good (or bad).

Thanks!

I submitted a ticket to them pointing to this thread.

I will inform here about any update.

What I saw at the transaction confirmation step in blockchain.info was a warning popup noticing about the big transaction fee amount. The first time it appears I was paying a transaction fee of 0.0005 btc, so when I saw that popup I reduced to 0.0003. It appears again and submitted the transaction anyway thinking it was very strange and don't analyzing the situation a lot cause I was hurry.
I will contact them to inform this.

Thanks

 

It's a strange circumstance, and I hope you get your coins back! I do agree that it's a bit weird that you could even do that, but I guess making limitations would be worse.

Be thankful a large pool found it so that you can still ask them.

There's chance you can get back your coins, I remember someone paid 20ish bitcoins as tx fee, and was included in a block found by p2p pool.

I do think that you have an extremely good chance of getting your tx fee back :) Made the same mistake, and the same pool refunded me.

What a good news!

Now the ticket was forwarded to the CEX.IO supervisor.

Forwarded up the chain, pretty awesome.

I'm curious to see their reaction.

I hope you will get the BTC back.  :)
And be more careful next time!

There shouldn't be any problems since no one really pays that much in transaction fees  ;)

The problem's that it can't be legitimately collected by GHash. They can't just take away their clients' funds, so they have to pay out of pocket if the OP or GHash can't successfully petition users to refund the fee. It's a bad situation because either the OP's a victim of himself or GHash is a martyr -- or, the OP accepts a partial refund from GHash miners who happened to stumble across (or were directed to) the news and were kind enough to figure out and return their share of the fee.

wait 2.8 btc in fee?

Thats so wrong... wtf..

Well im sure they have something in their terms of service giving them certain discretions.
Besides, they are not "taking away" their clients funds -- that extra 2.8 coins shouldnt
have been in there to begin with.

They have done it in the past on more than one occasion.  They may have changed their policy, all the OP can really do is ask them.

Yes, they are, since mining fees are paid out to miners on Ghash, so yes, they would be taking their money.

There's a lot of room for debate on that one.

Would GHash be taking money that belongs to the miners to pay back btcxchg?

Or would the miners be taking money that belongs to btcxchg if GHash pays them with these funds?

On the one hand you could say that once it is sent, it belongs to the receiver regardless of intent.

On the other hand, some could argue that an accidental payment to an unintended recipient carries a moral, ethical (and possibly? legal) requirement to return the payment to the sender.

No, you are allowed to change the Transaction fee to whatever you'd like.

@OP hope you can get your coins back.. I've never made that mistake, just read the payment over before :)

I'm the one who that payment was directed to and the owner of that wallet... I'm willing to help the sender as much as I can.. I really hope he can have his coins back, otherwise insert your wallet here for donations and I'll donate 0.01 btc myself.. Im pretty sure you won't have those 2.8 BTC from donations, but certainly you'd feel the community backs you up!

Caio

In my case with GHash.IO, my transaction fee (about BTC2.6) was distributed to the miners immediately after hitting the block, so instead of retrieving that balance from the miners, which the support person I contacted said was impossible, he forwarded my case to a supervisor who was able to pay me back the fee from GHash.IO's own funds.

Good luck to you :)

Great!

How long it happened?

I made my own mistake on Dec. 9th, 2013. So not that long ago.

Good luck to you

I mine at Ghash and I can see block 299885 with your 2.8BTC added. Regardless of what CEX do (and its a tough scenario for them) post your wallet address and I will send you the 'extra' reward I got from that block. It is a tiny amount for me, but its not mine and your error is genuine and easily done.

Ouch that was right before the peak too at a USD equivalent of 900 dollars!

Only recourse is to get in tuch with the mining pool operator
Not obligated to refund you, mind
Good luck

Wow, that is really nice.
Though I am not a fan of cex.io and ghash.io, I am pretty impressed to see they are willing to pay you from their own pocket. :)


Good luck OP. :)

Yeah, would have been a pretty large loss for me, lucky that GHash.IO was able to refund me.

To OP, just saying, it might take more than a week, because in my case, it had to be escalated from normal support to a supervisor who then had to contact the CFO. Be patient :)

Let us know when you have received your money from Ghash. I'm sure this sort of thing happens often

Thanks!

Now this ticket was forwarded to the tech area.
If that not progress I will post the wallet to ask for the help of the miners of GHash.IO.

2.8 in fees of transaction, is that even possible?

Yes, it is.

I've seen larger.  Much larger.

I've seen accidental transaction fees larger than 100 BTC.

Largest fee I think I've ever seen is BTC171.79869184, TXID 1d7749c65c90c32f5e2c036217a2574f3f4403da39174626b246eefa620b58d9.
Poor guy :P

Huge mistake man, i hope you will get back your BTC.

did you cantact GHash.IO? what did they say?

Ouch that is painful. I hope he got his coins back. When did this happen?

2011-12-12 16:57:45.
Block Reward + Transaction Fees = 221.84649523BTC

Yes, I opened a ticket that was forwarded to the supervisor and now is in the tech area.

Ghash is a big pool, there is a good possibility they haven't shared it yet (or even if they did, they might still compensate you). I don't think you can do anything other than contacting them and hoping for the best.

IIRC, block rewards are credited to account balance automatically upon block finding on ghash.io.

Exactly. Please read and comprehend before you give misleading answers, they share blocks rewards instantly, including transaction fees.

Because GHash.IO shares block rewards instantly, as I've already stated, the most obvious case here would be that GHash.IO would compensate OP from their own funds.

But I really don't understand why they would do so.

they should do so to get positive trust..i`m sure that 2.8 btc is not that to them..

First of all, its the mistake of the OP who added that much fee, mistake or without mistake it is OP's fault, who wanted to do urgent. Next i dont think ghash gonna send it to gain positive trust, its because it is not their fault, and its only the people who are kind in ghash gonna send it, as they can understand, mistake can happen.

I really hope you get your money back OP, the fees you paid are very high, and i think when you submitted it, you may got confirmed in seconds, Is that right?

If you bothered to read OP entirely, you might have noticed the TXID :) TX was added to a block in approx 12 minutes.
Just because you submit a tx with a huge-ass fee doesn't mean that all the miners in the world are going to mine a block for you in a few seconds.

Did you get this back?.

Please let us know, quite interested to see if they refunded you.

I don't think that'll ever happen. G Hash is not a military dictatorship.  ;D It has to abide by the the decisions from the majority of its members. I am sure than more than 90% of the members will refuse to send back the coins.

GHash.IO simply acts as a company would. From what I've seen it doesn't really care a smidgen about its customers - just making sure that it gets new ones. It's really quite obvious after all the shambled promotions they've tried to run which has simply led to alienated users. Not that it would really cost them much to send BTC2.8. They could very easily afford it for the positive PR.

They've done it once , why shouldn't they do it again? Good for reputation.

Correction: They have never retrieved coins from its members' balances before, but just compensated from their own funds. AFAIK, this is.

They could open an address for people who received the mining bonus to donate a few satoshi or more back.
There was a guy with the a paper wallet that did the same mistake and a few people donated if I remember it correctly.

That is essentially just donating, nothing that anybody is obligated to do.

Yes, I will inform any status change of the ticket.
Now it is in the tech area.

Tech area? That's not what happened to me :P
They just escalated it to a supervisor and the supervisor contacted the CFO for me, who sent me my fee back.

when you sent the ticket?

To the cex.io Tech support! Read the thread!

That's really unfortunate, you should be more careful when doing payments with such huge amounts. :)

Hi again community,
I am very glad to inform you that GHash.IO are very good guys and have refund me the 2.8 btc.

This is the CEX.IO support answer:


You can look the refund in the same address from where it was the sent
https://blockchain.info/address/1MtGNGScWBTT4SVi2rKf9v9846PmYd57Qv

Thanks a lot to all for your support!

Amazingly Surprising. Congratulations anyway!
Hope that you'll never make that mistake again.

Yup, you sure got lucky that GHash.IO found the block your tx is in :)
GJ

Glad you got your bitcoins back.

Very few have had a chance to re-do their mistakes.

So cool you got your coin back. Not only did you learn a big lesson, anyone that has read this thread will be more careful and double check all fields.

Congrats!

good to hear this..cex.io stand up to theyr reputation

Looks like CEX.IO is improving its reputation day by day.
Congratulations with your coins! :)

Twist:

What you have just witnessed is a clever PR stunt which is now on the Hot page of /r/Bitcoin.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/25gta1/28_btc_transaction_fee_paid_refunded_by_ghashio/ (http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/25gta1/28_btc_transaction_fee_paid_refunded_by_ghashio/)

Thanks for playing along everybody!

I would post that link for either a good or bad resolution of the ticket.

It is upon them to use that to positive or negative PR.

Overall, I think it will be a very useful warning about a possible mistake that it is no so common for most of the bitcoin users.

   

That is great news, and something ghash didn't have to do (disclaimer: I mine there and have positive experience). I haven't used blockchain wallet before and I don't know how the fee / transfer fields are set up or how big the "WARNING' messages are, but perhaps as part of this whole episode you should inform blockchain of the incident so that they can consider if their interface needs any adjusting.

In a wider context this is an interesting issue for how cryptocurrency transactions work relative to FIAT and how the openness of the procedure allows a whole audience to witness an issue like this get raised and then resolved.

nice one ghash, lucky man btcxchg  :)

Wow, this is really good news.  I'm very glad it worked out for you (and a bit surprised too because I think GHash.io would have paid at least partially out of pocket here). 

I love blockchain.info, but I think that one should have to enter some "Advanced User" section that is annoying to get to for the wallet to *ever* sign transactions with such astronomical fees. 

So GHASH have paid for the error with their own BTC?

Apparantly yes, because they did not take anything from my balance. But who knows. It'd be tedious to watch and verify every single transaction made on the platform thereafter. It would be fairly easy to sneak in an extra satoshi of fee in every transaction and this way get the 2.8 BTC back.

And in the end I do not care. If it would have been possible (due to my VERY small mining and the height of transaction fee it wasn't practically doable) I would have given back my part of the 2.8 BTC freely.

Where does it say anything about this being a scam PR stunt? And is there any evidence for this or are people just being unjustifiably cynical?

this

The fee should be automatically inputted, or there be at least an option to auto-fill in the correct fee. It's a minor annoyance that you have to manually put it in and it would definitely stop things like this from happening. New users also often don't really know how much to correctly send.

Indeed OP is not the only one getting refund of the tx fee. You can check post #23 for Injust's experience.

Indeed it is not only blockchain.info. I have heard of people accidentally mistyped the fee amount in Electrum as well.
IMHO, all wallet clients should warn the user when the fee amount is too big, say 10x more than min fee.

Even if it does not auto fill in the correct fee, there still should be a fee calculator online so that we know how much to include...

The problem is that bitcoin tx fee depends on the tx size in KB.
To calculate the "correct fee", you will need to know the number of inputs and outputs of that tx, which is a bit too difficulty to those new users...

Yeah... Well, someone could make a calculator, which looks up the input addresses from the blockchain, and calculates the size and the fee?

There is still a problem in it, as people usually don't "consolidate" their bitcoin.
So, the sender may have used 20 different addresses to receive bitcoin before (say, 10 addresses for 10 different faucets, 1 for sig ad payment, 1 for selling domain, 8 change addresses, etc).

Well, they could type in all addresses they want to send from.

I am afraid It will be too difficulty to use then.