Oops - 20BTC fee paid on .05 transaction?

[jeppe]

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

[Mitchell]

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

[e4xit]

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 errors like this can occur.

This posts sums it up nicely:

Can't wait to see grandma start using bitcoins. Oops, there goes 500 grand.

Yes, let's blame the entire Bitcoin infrastructure on one person's stupid mistake with raw transactions.

People have been losing their lives, daily, to automobile accidents since the automobile was invented. Not money, their lives!

Yet, we don't go around saying "automobiles are not an acceptable means of transportation for the mainstream, given that horrific errors like this can occur," do we?

"Can't wait to see grandma start driving a car. Oops, there goes grandma's life along with the family of 5 she crashed into."

Humans are going to make huge, sometimes life threatening, errors regardless of the tool you give them. It's up to the individual to educate and protect themselves. Even so, accidents will occur.

I've never heard of anyone making such a fee mistake unless they were messing with raw transactions to being with.

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!

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

[hilariousandco]

Can't wait to see grandma start using bitcoins. Oops, there goes 500 grand.

Just don't let Grandma use Brainwallet  .

[EvilPanda]

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

[jongameson]

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

[sdp]

Mining could be more profitable thanks to brainwallet.

[DeathAndTaxes]

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

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.

[Peter Lambert]

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

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.

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).

[quone17]

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

[eleuthria]

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.

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.

[cr1776]

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 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.

[DeboraMeeks]

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.

[David M]

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?

[malevolent]

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

[David M]

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.

[hilariousandco]

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.

[e521]

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/

[xzempt]

shouldnt be gambling with bitcoins....       

[trumbadera]

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

I am this guy https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=372725.0
I don't know where else to post since I can't post in that thread or the official P2Pool thread https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=18313.7200, but I am indeed the fool in question. I know that these things can happen with bitcoin if you are careless, and I know that none of the miners in P2Pool have any sort of obligation to return my coins, but if you are feeling like a very generous person, my address is 1Jt35Ww1GjM9iGyTM8mAyBmCPPdPz7Z35A. I'd also really appreciate if someone could relay this information to either of those threads.