Ouch, today someone made a transaction with over $500k fee.

[pawel7777]

The bitcoin fees market is getting out of control. Someone must've been really in a hurry as they paid BTC19.82 (~$511,000) fee just to send $2k worth.
Jokes aside, probably a very painful mistake. I wonder how's it going to unfold and whether the miner will return it to the unlucky sender.

Source:
Explorers: https://twitter.com/whale_alert/status/1700920065934213256
Blockstream: https://blockstream.info/tx/d5392d474b4c436e1c9d1f4ff4be5f5f9bb0eb2e26b61d2781751474b7e870fd?expand
Blockchain.com: https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/transactions/btc/d5392d474b4c436e1c9d1f4ff4be5f5f9bb0eb2e26b61d2781751474b7e870fd

[1715275927]

1715275927

[1715275927]

1715275927

[1715275927]

1715275927

[1715275927]

1715275927

[1715275927]

1715275927

[philipma1957]

The bitcoin fees market is getting out of control. Someone must've been really in a hurry as they paid BTC19.82 (~$511,000) fee just to send $2k worth.
Jokes aside, probably a very painful mistake. I wonder how's it going to unfold and whether the miner will return it to the unlucky sender.

Source:
Explorers: https://twitter.com/whale_alert/status/1700920065934213256
Blockstream: https://blockstream.info/tx/d5392d474b4c436e1c9d1f4ff4be5f5f9bb0eb2e26b61d2781751474b7e870fd?expand
Blockchain.com: https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/transactions/btc/d5392d474b4c436e1c9d1f4ff4be5f5f9bb0eb2e26b61d2781751474b7e870fd

Assuming its a legit mistake only a major pool would fix this. A small pool would likely keep it.

[Zenp]

The bitcoin fees market is getting out of control. Someone must've been really in a hurry as they paid BTC19.82 (~$511,000) fee just to send $2k worth.
Jokes aside, probably a very painful mistake. I wonder how's it going to unfold and whether the miner will return it to the unlucky sender.

Source:
Explorers: https://twitter.com/whale_alert/status/1700920065934213256
Blockstream: https://blockstream.info/tx/d5392d474b4c436e1c9d1f4ff4be5f5f9bb0eb2e26b61d2781751474b7e870fd?expand
Blockchain.com: https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/transactions/btc/d5392d474b4c436e1c9d1f4ff4be5f5f9bb0eb2e26b61d2781751474b7e870fd

I doubt it's an act of carelessness, anyone with that kind of a balance would at least know how and where to input the appropriate fees. It could be a way to donate a large sum to the bitcoin miners.

Here's a tx from 2016 that paid a 291.24 btc fee: https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/transactions/btc/cc455ae816e6cdafdb58d54e35d4f46d860047458eacf1c7405dc634631c570d this fee was worth 130k USD at that time as the BTC price was close to $441. Looking back now, this fee is worth 7.5m USD.

[albert0bsd]

Assuming its a legit mistake only a major pool would fix this. A small pool would likely keep it.

It was mined by F2Pool

Seems like an human errror but i don't know what to think.

According to the mempool.space page the block match with the expected, that means that the TX was public broadcasted.



The weird thing is that the TX is using the same source address as one of the outputs that means that it is the change wallet, so they may forgot to add the balance to that address or some faulty software/script did that.

[pawel7777]

I doubt it's an act of carelessness, anyone with that kind of a balance would at least know how and where to input the appropriate fees. It could be a way to donate a large sum to the bitcoin miners.

Here's a tx from 2016 that paid a 291.24 btc fee: https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/transactions/btc/cc455ae816e6cdafdb58d54e35d4f46d860047458eacf1c7405dc634631c570d this fee was worth 130k USD at that time as the BTC price was close to $441. Looking back now, this fee is worth 7.5m USD.

Thanks, the one from 2016, although much greater in BTC terms, was around 4 times lower in USD terms than today's one.
The 2016 transaction was widely reported as a sender's error, so not sure why would you dismiss the possibility of someone making a similar mistake today. I can't imagine anyone willing to send a "donation" to a random mining pool this way. Just sounds way less probable than a human error.

And if my memory serves me well, I think in 2016 the pool agreed to return the fee (but I may be thinking about yet another situation).

[DVlog]

The bitcoin fees market is getting out of control. Someone must've been really in a hurry as they paid BTC19.82 (~$511,000) fee just to send $2k worth.
Jokes aside, probably a very painful mistake. I wonder how's it going to unfold and whether the miner will return it to the unlucky sender.

Source:
Explorers: https://twitter.com/whale_alert/status/1700920065934213256
Blockstream: https://blockstream.info/tx/d5392d474b4c436e1c9d1f4ff4be5f5f9bb0eb2e26b61d2781751474b7e870fd?expand
Blockchain.com: https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/transactions/btc/d5392d474b4c436e1c9d1f4ff4be5f5f9bb0eb2e26b61d2781751474b7e870fd

This was like tipping a waiter a Lambo for a glass of water. It must be painful for that sender but some miners claim a jackpot. In crypto sometimes your carelessness can bring embarrassment to you like having the wrong tattoo on your butt which will never go.

If these were from a traditional banking sector many things could be done to recover that fund. But in crypto, this can be tricky because it is not a regulated territory where police will knock on the door and tell you to return the funds mistakenly sent by you. If the miner is generous enough he might return the fund but this was a lesson for all of us and it will be for rest of the year that we should check multiple times before clicking the send button.

[pawel7777]

Assuming its a legit mistake only a major pool would fix this. A small pool would likely keep it.

If it was a pool, returning the fee could bring in some legal issues, as all fees/block rewards should be split between pool participants, and I can't imagine all of them would be happy to give up an unexpected extra income.

[RocketSingh]

The bitcoin fees market is getting out of control. Someone must've been really in a hurry as they paid BTC19.82 (~$511,000) fee just to send $2k worth.
Jokes aside, probably a very painful mistake. I wonder how's it going to unfold and whether the miner will return it to the unlucky sender.

Source:
Explorers: https://twitter.com/whale_alert/status/1700920065934213256
Blockstream: https://blockstream.info/tx/d5392d474b4c436e1c9d1f4ff4be5f5f9bb0eb2e26b61d2781751474b7e870fd?expand
Blockchain.com: https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/transactions/btc/d5392d474b4c436e1c9d1f4ff4be5f5f9bb0eb2e26b61d2781751474b7e870fd

I doubt it's an act of carelessness, anyone with that kind of a balance would at least know how and where to input the appropriate fees. It could be a way to donate a large sum to the bitcoin miners.

Here's a tx from 2016 that paid a 291.24 btc fee: https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/transactions/btc/cc455ae816e6cdafdb58d54e35d4f46d860047458eacf1c7405dc634631c570d this fee was worth 130k USD at that time as the BTC price was close to $441. Looking back now, this fee is worth 7.5m USD.

There are actually many such stories...

In 2013, Friedcat refunded 200 BTC.

In 2014, BTC Guild refunded 30 BTC.

Details @ https://news.bitcoin.com/mining-pool-btc-com-80-btc-fee-refund/

Its thrilling to watch & verify all these on chain. The beauty of Bitcoin.

[Artemis3]

Good luck having f2pool return the money, i hope the affected person knows Chinese...

Can you imagine if this was found by a solo miner? lol, talk about winning the lottery: 26 bitcoins... above the reward given in 2013...

[panganib999]

Confirmed to be a human mistake. Publicly broadcasted, most likely since this is mined from F2Pool the money could be returned to the user since that is a huge amount of money, and it's a huge mining pool to boot. it's either the money's going to be returned, or the money won't be. Either way the user already paid for it, but something that presses me so much about this is why didn't the guy who made this transaction kept his mouth shut about it? Why is it that he decided to not tell anyone, not even F2Pool if I'm not mistaken, about this stuff?

Smelling some money laundering shit going in here, I know i sound like a fucking conspiracy theorist but at the same time the lines meet and if he kept his mouth shut about it it might just mean that he's not really keen about keeping the money one way or another.

[hatshepsut93]

I doubt it's an act of carelessness, anyone with that kind of a balance would at least know how and where to input the appropriate fees.

You assume that all mistakes come from the lack of knowledge or experience. But there's a wide variety of other reasons that can force someone to make a mistake, like being tired, sleep-deprived, distracted, etc. I don't see anything strange about a supposedly experienced a wealthy user making such mistake.

If anything, it shows how dangerous Bitcoin can be, because it allows such things to happen. So this should be a reminder that with Bitcoin you are your own bank, meaning you are responsible for checking your transactions and no one else.

[philipma1957]

I doubt it's an act of carelessness, anyone with that kind of a balance would at least know how and where to input the appropriate fees. It could be a way to donate a large sum to the bitcoin miners.

Here's a tx from 2016 that paid a 291.24 btc fee: https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/transactions/btc/cc455ae816e6cdafdb58d54e35d4f46d860047458eacf1c7405dc634631c570d this fee was worth 130k USD at that time as the BTC price was close to $441. Looking back now, this fee is worth 7.5m USD.

Thanks, the one from 2016, although much greater in BTC terms, was around 4 times lower in USD terms than today's one.
The 2016 transaction was widely reported as a sender's error, so not sure why would you dismiss the possibility of someone making a similar mistake today. I can't imagine anyone willing to send a "donation" to a random mining pool this way. Just sounds way less probable than a human error.

And if my memory serves me well, I think in 2016 the pool agreed to return the fee (but I may be thinking about yet another situation).

I remember ant pool returning a large mistake maybe 99 btc

[BitMaxz]

I think it was not a human mistake if it was mined from F2pool maybe the transaction was made by someone who mines in F2pool and withdraws his mined BTC.
Since F2pool withdrawal is free I believe that the transaction was created by them and included in the block to mine. F2pool can manually choose transactions so there is no problem if they create a transaction with a large fee they can just include the transaction later in the block they mine.

Because people nowadays are smart it's impossible that he didn't double-check the transaction fee before the transaction was broadcasted.

[terrific]

Ouch, that's a lot.

Code:

Amount
0.07405440BTC • $1,912.94

Fee
1,982,108,632SATS • $512,008

Well, hopefully that F2Pool will return but if they don't, they'll just justify that it's not their fault in the first place to put that kind of fee for a few thousand of transaction. Maybe, whoever the owner is can just have some dialogue and give a part of it back to F2Pool while returning some hefty amount of the fee, lol just some negotiation by having this mistake.

[sheenshane]

Unfortunately, if the doubt above was right, miners are not obligated to return the fee from a technical or protocol perspective.
So there's no assurance of being refunded.

IMO, this was what I was thinking of, it might be because of the miners themselves.
Some miners, including mining pools, might create transactions to send cryptocurrency from one of their own addresses to another.  Maybe by attaching a high fee to this transaction, they ensure it's included in the next block they mine, effectively paying themselves a higher fee but that's only my assumption.

Whatever it is, it's a huge amount of fee, looking for an update of it.

[Darker45]

People are talking about this and speculating a lot on social media. It seems there isn't any word from the one who made the transaction himself/herself. Some are saying this is a way to donate to the miners. I don't think that's really what happened. It's probably an error. I read of a possibility that he/she might have typed the amount to send in the space intended for fees and the fees in the space intended for amount to send.

Either way, Bitcoin's system exhorts us to double, even triple, check transaction details before confirming it. Finders keepers, losers weepers couldn't be more true in such a system.

[adaseb]

Yeah I was on Jochen earlier trying to find what is the optimal fee to use to send a transaction and noticed the huge spike which skewed the entire chart,
https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,24h,fee

See that high peak, yeah that was the transaction.

I think this person instead of using a wallet, they probably wrote out the transaction by hand and got the miner fee mixed up with the transaction fee. This is the only way I can see this happening since its most likely not laundering funds since it was mined by a large pool and not an unknown miner.

[Upgrade00]

I think it was not a human mistake if it was mined from F2pool maybe the transaction was made by someone who mines in F2pool and withdraws his mined BTC.

But in this case the transaction was broadcasted publicly and any miner would have been able to claim the block rewad. If anyone was looking to send money this way they will have only limited the transaction to their miner or directly minednit themselves but this was open for everyone.

Because people nowadays are smart it's impossible that he didn't double-check the transaction fee before the transaction was broadcasted.

People nowadays are far from smart and it is improbable (considering the amount) but not impossible that they didn't double check before sending.
One theory on Twitter, sorry X, is that the user mixed up the amount to send and transaction fees.

[bittraffic]

Such a huge loss.
It happens every near bull market. It seem like every bull market there is a newcomer in crypto who is very rich and doesn't know how to send with the minimum transaction fee.

I Wouldn't want to laugh at someone's misery but someone somewhere is going to be like the miners in F2pool.

[Zlantann]

The bitcoin fees market is getting out of control. Someone must've been really in a hurry as they paid BTC19.82 (~$511,000) fee just to send $2k worth.
Jokes aside, probably a very painful mistake. I wonder how's it going to unfold and whether the miner will return it to the unlucky sender.

Source:
Explorers: https://twitter.com/whale_alert/status/1700920065934213256
Blockstream: https://blockstream.info/tx/d5392d474b4c436e1c9d1f4ff4be5f5f9bb0eb2e26b61d2781751474b7e870fd?expand
Blockchain.com: https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/transactions/btc/d5392d474b4c436e1c9d1f4ff4be5f5f9bb0eb2e26b61d2781751474b7e870fd

I just don't know what to think in this case. Was the owner drunk or having some health issues? Maybe the wallet and funds were inherited by someone who has little knowledge about Bitcoin and was trying to make his first transaction. It could also be a human error from someone knowledgeable. I think is ethical for the F2Pool to refund the funds after deducting some expenses, doing that will make their reputation rise in the industry. As the story unfolds I just hope it has a good ending and that the funds are returned to the owner.

[o_e_l_e_o]

I think this person instead of using a wallet, they probably wrote out the transaction by hand and got the miner fee mixed up with the transaction fee.

There is no "miner fee" and "transaction fee". These refer to the same thing. Bitcoin transactions pay a single fee, which goes to whichever miner includes that transaction in a block.

When a transaction is written out in raw hex, there is actually no field to specify the fee at all. You specify the inputs you want to spend, you specify the outputs you want to send money to, and you specify how much money you are sending to each output. You don't specify the fee. The fee is worked out from the sum of the inputs minus the sum of the outputs. It is essentially "whatever is left over". In previous transactions like this the error has been the creator not realizing this, forgetting to include a change address, and therefore everything that they didn't specify being used as a fee. What is unusual here is that the transaction involved does include a change address (the same address the coins are sent from), so the person who made this transaction has made some other mistake.

[retreat]

It was quite surprising to see 1 bitcoin transaction with fees that big and most likely that it was the sender's error because it was a public broadcast. I don't know what the sender was thinking, whether he was sleepy or what, because a sane person would not be able to arrange fees of that size for just one transaction worth $2K USD. Hopefully F2Pool can return the fees to the sender or not at all because it's not their fault.

[Doan9269]

The bitcoin fees market is getting out of control. Someone must've been really in a hurry as they paid BTC19.82 (~$511,000) fee just to send $2k worth.
Jokes aside, probably a very painful mistake. I wonder how's it going to unfold and whether the miner will return it to the unlucky sender.

Honestly there might just have been a mistake from either the sender making a mistake of adding an additional figure when he intends to press just only one or maybe the mining pool used broadcasred his transaction across other addresss who's transaction fees are higher making it appears that way, but since it's an open transaction we don't know which miner will claim this to add as their block reward, the error that happened could be traced down to the sender and not the network.

[Outhue]

That's a lot of money, I have made similar mistake before with one of the old popular Bitcoin wallet, I use 90$ to send 5$ worth of Bitcoin and it was a lot to me at the time because I couldn't even afford 100$ back then, I couldn't remember the name, but the wallet was out when JAXX wallet was newly released, oh yes it's Samorai wallet, I couldn't believe how it happened, because I have used Coinomi and Copay wallet before this wallet so I am very familiar with how to make Bitcoin transaction.

I just uninstalled the wallet and never look back, rushing to make transactions could make you do some costly mistakes, take your time, relax, and check the wallet you are sending Bitcoin to very well before clicking on the SEND button.

[avp2306]

The bitcoin fees market is getting out of control. Someone must've been really in a hurry as they paid BTC19.82 (~$511,000) fee just to send $2k worth.
Jokes aside, probably a very painful mistake. I wonder how's it going to unfold and whether the miner will return it to the unlucky sender.

Source:
Explorers: https://twitter.com/whale_alert/status/1700920065934213256
Blockstream: https://blockstream.info/tx/d5392d474b4c436e1c9d1f4ff4be5f5f9bb0eb2e26b61d2781751474b7e870fd?expand
Blockchain.com: https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/transactions/btc/d5392d474b4c436e1c9d1f4ff4be5f5f9bb0eb2e26b61d2781751474b7e870fd

He or She must be drunk will setting up that transaction since imagine how huge the fee he set up then for sure he is now so bothered with the money he lost out of that transaction. He should at least check the mempool to see what is the recommended fee to make his transaction fast but crazy things happen I guess this serves a lesson for him and for people which read his story since this is really a painful mistake done by holder.

[albert0bsd]

Nobody is mentioning that the address (bc1qr35hws365juz5rtlsjtvmulu97957kqvr3zpw3) is very active and it looks like all those TX are automated

So based on this personally i only can think that it was caused by a code error, some exception that was not correctly handled, but that is also very unlikey, as developer i don't see a case where it can fail like this.


if you see all TX the Change address is the firsts (Same wallet) and all of them are handled it correctly

[satscraper]

Assuming its a legit mistake only a major pool would fix this. A small pool would likely keep it.

It was mined by F2Pool

Seems like an human errror but i don't know what to think.

Is there any chance that  "human error"  was intentionally made as a  part of money laundering scheme used by F2Pool? I understand that it is very risky way to cleanse dirty money as the  transaction with such enormous fee could be mined by other pool but they might have no option other than to lose money or mine it be themselves.

[albert0bsd]

...  transaction with such enormous fee could be mined by other pool but they might have no option other than to lose money or mine it be themselves.

I already discard that theory, the TX was publicly broadcasted according to mempool.space data. The TX was match with the expected block.

According to blockchain

Broadcasted on 10 Sep 2023 5:02:56

And the block was mined:

Mined on September 10, 2023 5:10:01

Almost 7 minutes on mempool, that actually can be mined by anyone with some decent hash rate or some luck.

So if you want to launder some money you shouldn't use that way.

[AHOYBRAUSE]

Oh wow, what a costly mistake.

The question is, how can something like this happen?
At some wallets it gives you a warning if the fee you chose is way higher than necessary but 19btc, come on. Any wallet should stop the person of making this transaction as it is an obvious mistake.
Maybe now, after this story got public, wallets will make some adjustments to prevent something like that.

That's really some insane stuff. Hopefully the person has like 1000s of btc and can live with the error. This type of mistake can break a person and ruin his/her life forever otherwise.

[o_e_l_e_o]

So based on this personally i only can think that it was caused by a code error, some exception that was not correctly handled, but that is also very unlikey, as developer i don't see a case where it can fail like this.

Absolutely.

The address is obviously owned by some exchange or other service. It was first used fairly recently on June 22nd, and it seems to only have received funds from this address: bc1qlm0xlahpysq2v9yh5rhcc430xjz3xknqqnyvaf. The transactions are clearly automated. They've made 60,000 transactions without an error, and a few hundred more since this error occurred. I wonder what the error is? My only thought is someone tried to withdraw to the exchange's address and it somehow overwrote the change output.

F2Pool have said they will hold the funds for three days and return them to the rightful owner if claimed: https://nitter.cz/satofishi/status/1701042302238724512#m

[DVlog]

Yeah I was on Jochen earlier trying to find what is the optimal fee to use to send a transaction and noticed the huge spike which skewed the entire chart,
https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,24h,fee

See that high peak, yeah that was the transaction.

I think this person instead of using a wallet, they probably wrote out the transaction by hand and got the miner fee mixed up with the transaction fee. This is the only way I can see this happening since its most likely not laundering funds since it was mined by a large pool and not an unknown miner.

You have raised a good point. Mixing miner fees for transaction fees is understandable but a person with such an amount doesn't know which one is a miner fee is weird. Perhaps he sent that transaction in a hurry and didn't notice that the transaction fees he put in were enormous. There can be a wallet glitch as well. We don't know which wallet he was using so this is another possibility. I do not think that Send is a newcomer because a newcomer with that amount of Bitcoin is rare.

What if this was done with the intention of money laundering? This is a strange case and this doesn't look like a traditional money laundering. Perhaps someone was trying to obfuscate the origins of the BTC. But paying high fees like this doesn't make sense in traditional money laundering cases.

[bhadz]

F2Pool have said they will hold the funds for three days and return them to the rightful owner if claimed: https://nitter.cz/satofishi/status/1701042302238724512#m

While reading all of the posts in here, I was thinking if it's gonna be refunded but it's such a good news to see that F2Pool is just gonna hold based on the update given by oeleo.

That's really some insane stuff. Hopefully the person has like 1000s of btc and can live with the error. This type of mistake can break a person and ruin his/her life forever otherwise.

I think it's a rare case and usually people that make a mistake like this aren't really people but the exchanges or some huge services that's been operating related. But for real if this is like just an individual person and does this mistake, something may come terribly to his mind and we don't know what's gonna be the end of that story.

[decodx]

F2Pool have said they will hold the funds for three days and return them to the rightful owner  : https://nitter.cz/satofishi/status/1701042302238724512#m

Wow, that's some serious stuff. Just imagine being the developer who goofed up like that! I hope the person responsible can rest easy now that F2Pool is saying they'll give refund if anyone claims it.

But what if no one actually asks for the money? It could mean a couple of things. Either someone made the mistake intentionally and doesn't want to draw attention to it, or maybe they're totally unaware of the blunder.

[pawel7777]

F2Pool have said they will hold the funds for three days and return them to the rightful owner if claimed: https://nitter.cz/satofishi/status/1701042302238724512#m

That's bold, but I kind of expected that big pool like them will make an offer to refund, it's a good PR. Although I can imagine a lot of miners participating in their pool might not be happy about it. After all, it's their money, so any offers like that should be somehow agreed with them.

Can you imagine if this was found by a solo miner? lol, talk about winning the lottery: 26 bitcoins... above the reward given in 2013...

All solo-miners are good guys, I'm sure any of them would refund the fee.

Meanwhile, the story is making headlines in crypto-related news portals:

https://thecryptobasic.com/2023/09/11/future-of-finance-bitcoin-user-pays-jaw-dropping-19-bitcoin-in-transaction-fee/
https://www.financemagnates.com/trending/bitcoin-user-pays-outrageous-510000-transaction-fee/
https://u.today/bitcoin-user-just-paid-half-a-million-dollars-for-a-single-transaction
https://cryptoslate.com/bitcoin-users-costly-error-leads-to-record-transaction-fee-of-510000/
https://www.newsbtc.com/bitcoin-news/lost-in-transaction-bitcoin-user-overpaid-by-500000-for-a-200-deal/
https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2023/09/11/bitcoin-insane-fees-spent-transaction/
https://www.cryptopolitan.com/a-half-million-dollar-mistake-user-pays-500000-fee-for-a-200-bitcoin-transaction/

[joniboini]

Although I can imagine a lot of miners participating in their pool might not be happy about it. After all, it's their money, so any offers like that should be somehow agreed with them.

I don't see how practical it would be for them to ask every miner if they agree or not. It can also affect their image if they do a poll or something similar. I believe doing something like this would give them better PR and the user would likely give them a bonus instead. But yeah, we don't really know what is happening behind the scenes. Maybe the the user can't provide any proof and the money still belongs to the pool anyway.

or maybe they're totally unaware of the blunder.

It would be really odd if they never realized they received so little of their funds from doing a simple transaction.

[philipma1957]

...  transaction with such enormous fee could be mined by other pool but they might have no option other than to lose money or mine it be themselves.

I already discard that theory, the TX was publicly broadcasted according to mempool.space data. The TX was match with the expected block.

According to blockchain

Broadcasted on 10 Sep 2023 5:02:56

And the block was mined:

Mined on September 10, 2023 5:10:01

Almost 7 minutes on mempool, that actually can be mined by anyone with some decent hash rate or some luck.

So if you want to launder some money you shouldn't use that way.

It is a moron mistake. Maybe they will refund it.

If i solo hit that block I would most likely publicly refund 95% of the fee.

[Lakai01]

It is a moron mistake. Maybe they will refund it.

If i solo hit that block I would most likely publicly refund 95% of the fee.

As @o_e_l_e_o wrote the transactions are clearly automated; it is highly likely that no one has intervened manually here. The only question is how this could happen ... a faulty code that only hits after ~60k transactions is of course possible, but especially such highly critical code parts are usually not used lightly in a productive environment.

However, I can't see any intention behind it at first glance, for money laundering or the like the process would be much too delicate. Of course, it is quite possible that the Bitcoins were "gotten rid of", but there would be much better ways to do that.

[DapanasFruit]

I am really wondering how come a person with having that amount of Bitcoin in his wallet be not so careful with this transaction. He must be so sleepy so as not see that he is actually paying a very large fees for a transaction that is just minuscule. Or he just be another ignorant crypto holder that is now paying a hefty tuition fee for this mistake. Now, am hoping that there can be some kind of a warning that will announce "tot tot" when you are about to pay a huge fees so one can check and recheck before letting the transaction go ahead.

[GreatArkansas]

I'm curious how this mistake is being made.
It is something related if you send a Bitcoin or do some transaction then you can update how many satoshi/byte you will use?

Bitcoin wallets must have some special feature that this incident will be prevented, it is huge money.

[NotATether]

I just don't know what to think in this case. Was the owner drunk or having some health issues? Maybe the wallet and funds were inherited by someone who has little knowledge about Bitcoin and was trying to make his first transaction. It could also be a human error from someone knowledgeable. I think is ethical for the F2Pool to refund the funds after deducting some expenses, doing that will make their reputation rise in the industry. As the story unfolds I just hope it has a good ending and that the funds are returned to the owner.

Most wallets do not let you specify the absolute fee of the transaction, and only the fee rate in satoshis (per vbyte), so a truly careless person would have to somehow shove 10 zeroes into the fee rate or had automated the transaction, because this is bordering on the line of recklessness otherwise. I don't see how someone can accidentially pay $500k in fees otherwise.

[o_e_l_e_o]

What if this was done with the intention of money laundering?

It wasn't. The transaction was broadcast publicly, meaning any miner could have mined it and claimed the fee.

Bitcoin wallets must have some special feature that this incident will be prevented, it is huge money.

Many wallets do implement some kind of sanity check if you select outrageous fees. But this is clearly an automated system and not some piece of wallet software, and whoever programmed it obviously did not include such a sanity check.

[Fivestar4everMVP]

Saw this in the news yesterday, and like it was stated there, the pool that took the fees have already set it aside giving the owner of the transaction 3 days to come forward and claim back the fees.

And it was also learnt that the wallet that sent this transaction likely belonged to an exchange, and the high fees was as a result of faulty or software that malfunctioned

[tbct_mt2]

Saw this in the news yesterday, and like it was stated there, the pool that took the fees have already set it aside giving the owner of the transaction 3 days to come forward and claim back the fees.

And it was also learnt that the wallet that sent this transaction likely belonged to an exchange, and the high fees was as a result of faulty or software that malfunctioned

Giving 3 days to claim it are too short but F2Pool opens to cooperate with the sender. The value is not small so the sender must hurry up to contact F2Pool for claiming that bitcoin back.

The in and out transactions look big enough in number of transactions pointed out by Jameson Lopp but I don't really think it can be a software bug. It can be something intentionally did to create fud like Bitcoin is not perfect, you can lose money with it by using a Bitcoin software to send transactions. The market is still in rumor season so I am keen on this assumption.

[Woodie]

The bitcoin fees market is getting out of control. Someone must've been really in a hurry as they paid BTC19.82 (~$511,000) fee just to send $2k worth.
Jokes aside, probably a very painful mistake. I wonder how's it going to unfold and whether the miner will return it to the unlucky sender.

Source:
Explorers: https://twitter.com/whale_alert/status/1700920065934213256
Blockstream: https://blockstream.info/tx/d5392d474b4c436e1c9d1f4ff4be5f5f9bb0eb2e26b61d2781751474b7e870fd?expand
Blockchain.com: https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/transactions/btc/d5392d474b4c436e1c9d1f4ff4be5f5f9bb0eb2e26b61d2781751474b7e870fd

I know for certain you can track which miner mines the block and what time this happened, but Is it even possible for a miner to return such a good reward??

As far as am concerned miners look forward to harvesting such block rewards because they know that these mistakes always happen & will not stop today either and you can not blame anybody for such a costly mistake, besides why bother with the fees when 8 out of 10 times the fees suggested by the wallet app will usually be adequate enough for you not to wait all day for a single confirmation

Whatever is happening here, this guy has learnt the hard way!
Edit

Saw this in the news yesterday, and like it was stated there, the pool that took the fees have already set it aside giving the owner of the transaction 3 days to come forward and claim back the fees.

And it was also learnt that the wallet that sent this transaction likely belonged to an exchange, and the high fees was as a result of faulty or software that malfunctioned

lucky whale/exchange hope they make the claim as time is counting down

[yhiaali3]

It is truly unbelievable. This is a very large amount of money that was paid in fees. I cannot believe how someone could send such a large amount and not check the transaction two or three times before sending. I don’t know what to call this. Is it bad luck or negligence?

I don't know how this error happened in the first place? When I send Bitcoin from my wallet, the fees are determined automatically, and there is a maximum and a minimum limit for the fees. So how did this error occur and fees were sent that exceed the maximum limit by thousands of times? Unless the wallet this unlucky person used allows manual entry of fees or the wallet has a problem.

[FatFork]

The in and out transactions look big enough in number of transactions pointed out by Jameson Lopp but I don't really think it can be a software bug. It can be something intentionally did to create fud like Bitcoin is not perfect, you can lose money with it by using a Bitcoin software to send transactions. The market is still in rumor season so I am keen on this assumption.

If that were true, it would be an incredibly costly way to spread FUD, with an almost negligible impact in the end!! I can come up with at least a dozen more effective ways to spread FUD if someone were truly willing to invest that much money.

Why do you think it's not just a software bug? It's happened before, you know.

[gunhell16]

I think that in that incident, there is a possibility that F2pool will return it to the sender who made the transaction. Although they cannot return it because it is not their fault. But as far as I can see, F2pool is not like that because they already had experience like that way back on June 11, 2020, when they returned around 500k$ https://cointelegraph.com/news/f2pool-returns-500k-of-abnormal-eth-transaction-fee-to-sender


Then, at the latest, F2pool is still contacted about that matter.


So it can be said if the sender still has hope that it will be returned to him because the history of f2pool is good.

https://www.binance.com/en/feed/post/2023-09-11-f2pool-to-temporarily-hold-20-btc-from-high-fee-transaction-1121998

[tbct_mt2]

If that were true, it would be an incredibly costly way to spread FUD, with an almost negligible impact in the end!! I can come up with at least a dozen more effective ways to spread FUD if someone were truly willing to invest that much money.

My belief goes to their belief in mining pools that won't enjoy those bitcoin. If a mining pool is greedy and take it, that mining pool will be criticized by community and I did not check but some mistakenly transactions like this one, only went to big mining pools. I remembered a case for Etheremine pool for ETH years ago too.

They bet that a mining pool can get more income if it is used by miners a long time. My thinking could be wrong, I admit that.

I checked and Ethermine pool was ready to refund it to sender but sender did not contact them to claim it.
Mining Pools Distribute $2.4M Transaction Fee After Flood of Phoney Refund Claims

[Zenp]

Saw this in the news yesterday, and like it was stated there, the pool that took the fees have already set it aside giving the owner of the transaction 3 days to come forward and claim back the fees.

looks like the sender still hasn't reached out to f2pool yet, and its been almost 2 days. In another 27 hours, it will be 3 days and the fee will be distributed to the miners.
My opinion is that if the sender made a mistake, they would have surfaced by now to claim the money back, if they haven't done this is 45hrs (as of now), its unlikely they will before the end of the 3 days.

[Z-tight]

If anything, it shows how dangerous Bitcoin can be, because it allows such things to happen. So this should be a reminder that with Bitcoin you are your own bank, meaning you are responsible for checking your transactions and no one else.

You are responsible for checking your trasactions when you want to make a payment using any payment method, even if it is a centralized payment method, the only difference here is that BTC tx's can't be reversed, whereas many centralized payment systems are reversible. BTC is not dangerous because people make mistakes that they shouldn't make, it is easy to check the fee rate and fee you are about to use before making your tx, this only happens when people are either careless or are using poorly created automatic payment systems.

[pawel7777]

Giving 3 days to claim it are too short but F2Pool opens to cooperate with the sender.

Yeah, it seems short, but considering they didn't have to do that at all, it's still a nice gesture on their part. The short period could be due to the fact that, if that BTC20 is unclaimed, they'd have to divide it among participating miners according to their share at that time. And as miners' come and go and could change their pay-out addresses, redistribution of earnings after a longer period of time could be difficult.
I wonder if F2Pool stated how exactly is the unlucky sender supposed to make a claim. I wouldn't be surprised if they got flooded with spam messages from either jokers or scammers pretending to be the sender, so it might take some time to weed out the fake ones and verify the real one.

[FatFork]

If that were true, it would be an incredibly costly way to spread FUD, with an almost negligible impact in the end!! I can come up with at least a dozen more effective ways to spread FUD if someone were truly willing to invest that much money.

My belief goes to their belief in mining pools that won't enjoy those bitcoin. If a mining pool is greedy and take it, that mining pool will be criticized by community and I did not check but some mistakenly transactions like this one, only went to big mining pools.

But still, that would be too much of a gamble. Over 2% of all blocks each month are mined by solo miners or obscure mining pools that are unknown to the public. If there's no one to point fingers at, the community wouldn't have anyone to criticize.

I wonder if F2Pool stated how exactly is the unlucky sender supposed to make a claim. I wouldn't be surprised if they got flooded with spam messages from either jokers or scammers pretending to be the sender, so it might take some time to weed out the fake ones and verify the real one.

Regardless of the communication method, I'm confident that the folks at F2Pool are smart enough to know the only surefire way to prove address ownership. We're in the crypto world, after all.

[OgNasty]

A little hard to believe that somebody could make this sort of mistake in this day and age but developers are people too. No doubt this was a sign of somebody’s last day at work, or maybe their first day. Needless to say, this was clearly an accident and likely the result of an error in somebody’s custom code that cost them bigtime.

[Hamza2424]

Hmm, interesting but I'm sure this is not the first time such a huge fee has been paid to cover the transaction, as I remember a few of them at least in back 2017 2.6BTC fees mistakenly paid by someone. This case is one of the most costly ones I think. I was covering the reference to the 2017 case and here is what I found on the ChatGPT..

The 4th case is one of the most epic ones not sure about the authenticity as sometimes ChatGPT is not reliable at all I was trying to get references, but unfortunately, I cant find any... But for the 1st I'm sure because I can remember there was discussion about it during the class lecture. I think this should be taken as the lesson that while processing a transaction, User must double-check it.. Most of the time the error exists on the User end, sometimes the UI can also cause such an incident.

[Faisal2202]

I'm quite amazed to see that some really paid that much amount for just $2000 worth of BTC. And according to the news, they says, the owner might not have aware of the mistake he made because he is against making transaction on his wallet and no one comes to claim the fee paid as per this news They says

Chun Wang, co-founder of F2Pool, said the 20 BTC fees will be temporarily held. The user responsible for the transaction has a three-day window to claim these fees. However, if no one comes forward to claim them, miners will redistribute the fees.

The point is, I think the owner who made a mistake can still claim the fee I think. I truly did not know that the fees could be returned back well I think it's just an exceptional case that F2Pool has made just for the sake of the victim.

The 4th case is one of the most epic ones not sure about the authenticity as sometimes ChatGPT is not reliable at all I was trying to get references, but unfortunately, I cant find any... But for the 1st I'm sure because I can remember there was discussion about it during the class lecture. I think this should be taken as the lesson that while processing a transaction, User must double-check it.. Most of the time the error exists on the User end, sometimes the UI can also cause such an incident.

You are asking about 4th point, I did not even find a single link to other points/events. You are 100% right about the authenticity of GPT as it does not provide accurate data. Well, if you are trying to get source links then ask GPT to provide them for each event and it will provide you but most of the time those links will be invalid.

[Silberman]

I doubt it's an act of carelessness, anyone with that kind of a balance would at least know how and where to input the appropriate fees.

You assume that all mistakes come from the lack of knowledge or experience. But there's a wide variety of other reasons that can force someone to make a mistake, like being tired, sleep-deprived, distracted, etc. I don't see anything strange about a supposedly experienced a wealthy user making such mistake.

If anything, it shows how dangerous Bitcoin can be, because it allows such things to happen. So this should be a reminder that with Bitcoin you are your own bank, meaning you are responsible for checking your transactions and no one else.

Especially since we see those mistakes happening with fiat all the time, which should be simpler to use as you do not have to input the fees you have to pay, as the fees are subtracted automatically by the bank, and while there could be something going on, it seems to me the most likely explanation is that the person behind the transaction made a major mistake and they simply did not realized this was the case until it was too late, and now they depend on the kindness of strangers to recover their money.

[carlfebz2]

The bitcoin fees market is getting out of control. Someone must've been really in a hurry as they paid BTC19.82 (~$511,000) fee just to send $2k worth.
Jokes aside, probably a very painful mistake. I wonder how's it going to unfold and whether the miner will return it to the unlucky sender.

Source:
Explorers: https://twitter.com/whale_alert/status/1700920065934213256
Blockstream: https://blockstream.info/tx/d5392d474b4c436e1c9d1f4ff4be5f5f9bb0eb2e26b61d2781751474b7e870fd?expand
Blockchain.com: https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/transactions/btc/d5392d474b4c436e1c9d1f4ff4be5f5f9bb0eb2e26b61d2781751474b7e870fd

We do have similar past events something like this but this one happens on ETH transaction.

A crypto exchange accidentally paid a $24 million fee for a $100,000 ethereum transaction – but the miner agreed to return it
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/currencies/crypto-exchange-bitfinex-ethereum-tether-transaction-fees-error-deversifi-2021-9

Therefore, there would really be high possibilities or most likely this amount could be given back but it would really be depending though on the miner.
This is why its never been that ideal on making up some rush transactions because this is where mistakes or errors could happen and sometimes
its something that would really be costly and there's no assurance whether those amounts would be given back or not.
Lets just hope that particular person would really be able to get those and that would really be entirely be depending on the miner.

[Stalker22]

not sure about the authenticity as sometimes ChatGPT is not reliable at all I was trying to get references, but unfortunately, I cant find any...
~

ChatGPT is not a search engine, obviously; it is a language model. It generates responses from the massive amount of text it learned from. Sharing responses that may not align with reality is not only unhelpful but potentially misleading.

If you are eager to contribute something valuable to the community, I recommend conducting your own research. Relying solely on ChatGPT for information may not always bring the most reliable results.

[pawel7777]

I truly did not know that the fees could be returned back well I think it's just an exceptional case that F2Pool has made just for the sake of the victim.

Transaction fees are not reversible, just like any other Bitcoin transactions (once confirmed). So yes, it's not like there's any "chargeback" option, it's all just a good will of F2Pool to agree to send it back.

You are asking about 4th point, I did not even find a single link to other points/events. You are 100% right about the authenticity of GPT as it does not provide accurate data. Well, if you are trying to get source links then ask GPT to provide them for each event and it will provide you but most of the time those links will be invalid.

It's legit. Here's the link to an article: https://news.bitcoin.com/mining-pool-btc-com-80-btc-fee-refund/ posted by RocketSingh here

[Davidvictorson]

There are actually many such stories...

In 2013, Friedcat refunded 200 BTC.

In 2014, BTC Guild refunded 30 BTC.

Details @ https://news.bitcoin.com/mining-pool-btc-com-80-btc-fee-refund/

Its thrilling to watch & verify all these on chain. The beauty of Bitcoin.

At first I thought that it is a costly mistake and the person won't get their BTC back.

But the examples of miners who have refunded BTC gives me hope that the person in the story gets a refund.

However this brings to thought, two pertinent questions

• Is there any extrinsic reward if the miner refunds  the BTC?
• Is there a punishment for the miner whether big or small if they refuse to make a refund even after it has been verified?

[panganib999]

There are actually many such stories...

In 2013, Friedcat refunded 200 BTC.

In 2014, BTC Guild refunded 30 BTC.

Details @ https://news.bitcoin.com/mining-pool-btc-com-80-btc-fee-refund/

Its thrilling to watch & verify all these on chain. The beauty of Bitcoin.

At first I thought that it is a costly mistake and the person won't get their BTC back.

But the examples of miners who have refunded BTC gives me hope that the person in the story gets a refund.

However this brings to thought, two pertinent questions

• Is there any extrinsic reward if the miner refunds  the BTC?
• Is there a punishment for the miner whether big or small if they refuse to make a refund even after it has been verified?

It's a classic ethical problem. The miner gains nothing and loses everything from whole ordeal. 500k is 500k after all and it's not like you could find a loose 500k when you walk out your door for that morning jog or to grab a bite for breakfast. The miner has to give the money back to the user out of his own pure moral compass and all that. Which I myself don't think is a great basis anyway considering the implications of todays' world setting. In any case, I still think the miner should return the fee since that's still someone else's money. But we can't be very hopeful really, since the miner's anonymous, and we don't have any way whatsoever of rendering him accountable should he run off with the money.

[albert0bsd]

However this brings to thought, two pertinent questions

• Is there any extrinsic reward if the miner refunds  the BTC?
• Is there a punishment for the miner whether big or small if they refuse to make a refund even after it has been verified?

No, there is not an extrinsic reward for that, maybe only Advertising.

Second questions is debatable, in theory there is not punishment, maybe just a little of bad reputation but it wasn't their fault in first place

[PX-Z]

Now, this is what you called a news. What a messed up. But based on previous the same incidents the fee was refunded by the miner who mined the blocked, i just don't how it will go this time.

[o_e_l_e_o]

So, turns out it was PayPal which made this error: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/markets/paypal-reportedly-overpaid-510750-in-the-largest-usd-bitcoin-transaction-fee-ever-

PayPal are blaming Paxos, and Paxos are releasing the usual boilerplate "Funds are safu" nonsense while reportedly contracting F2Pool to get their money back.

Just another data point to add the the hundreds of thousands of data points showing that no matter how big, how well know, how "reputable" any centralized exchange is, they cannot be trusted to use even basic security protocols.

[serveria.com]

The bitcoin fees market is getting out of control. Someone must've been really in a hurry as they paid BTC19.82 (~$511,000) fee just to send $2k worth.
Jokes aside, probably a very painful mistake. I wonder how's it going to unfold and whether the miner will return it to the unlucky sender.

Source:
Explorers: https://twitter.com/whale_alert/status/1700920065934213256
Blockstream: https://blockstream.info/tx/d5392d474b4c436e1c9d1f4ff4be5f5f9bb0eb2e26b61d2781751474b7e870fd?expand
Blockchain.com: https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/transactions/btc/d5392d474b4c436e1c9d1f4ff4be5f5f9bb0eb2e26b61d2781751474b7e870fd

Indeed, ouch, I almost feel physical pain when I read how someone fat-fingered such a huge amount to the miners. It would be fair for the pool to return the sum if requested by the sender and it would be fair for the sender to send some amount as a gift back to the pool. Something like $10k would be a great tip I guess. 

[Lanatsa]

The bitcoin fees market is getting out of control. Someone must've been really in a hurry as they paid BTC19.82 (~$511,000) fee just to send $2k worth.
Jokes aside, probably a very painful mistake. I wonder how's it going to unfold and whether the miner will return it to the unlucky sender.

Source:
Explorers: https://twitter.com/whale_alert/status/1700920065934213256
Blockstream: https://blockstream.info/tx/d5392d474b4c436e1c9d1f4ff4be5f5f9bb0eb2e26b61d2781751474b7e870fd?expand
Blockchain.com: https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/transactions/btc/d5392d474b4c436e1c9d1f4ff4be5f5f9bb0eb2e26b61d2781751474b7e870fd

Indeed, ouch, I almost feel physical pain when I read how someone fat-fingered such a huge amount to the miners. It would be fair for the pool to return the sum if requested by the sender and it would be fair for the sender to send some amount as a gift back to the pool. Something like $10k would be a great tip I guess. 

Here's the update of the said huge fees been accidentally sent out.

“Paxos overpaid the BTC network fee on Sept. 10, 2023. This only impacted Paxos corporate operations. Paxos clients and end users have not been affected and all customer funds are safe. This was due to a bug on a single transfer and it has been fixed. Paxos is in contact with the miner to recoup the funds.”

Source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/paxos-confirms-responsible-for-500k-mistaken-bitcoin-transaction

As long that miner would really be willing to give it back (which is likely) then i do agree that it wont really be that
bad on giving some $10k tip but i highly doubt that. lol

[Cricktor]

As already noted here, the involved address, presumably under control of Paxos, had some huge amount (~63k+) of transactions, some sort of payment processor or whatever it is under some software and/or script control. What astonishes me the most is the lack of sanity checks or how such a bug with huge loss effect could emerge. Some transaction fee estimation is surely necessary especially when there's presumably some automation involved, but why does the software not check and verify if the final transaction details meet the fee estimation at least within one order of magnitude? That's scary!

I'm not sure if enough details will come to the surface what exactly happened here. I guess, they went cheap on software quality control or worse.

[pawel7777]

Here's the update of the said huge fees been accidentally sent out.

“Paxos overpaid the BTC network fee on Sept. 10, 2023. This only impacted Paxos corporate operations. Paxos clients and end users have not been affected and all customer funds are safe. This was due to a bug on a single transfer and it has been fixed. Paxos is in contact with the miner to recoup the funds.”

Source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/paxos-confirms-responsible-for-500k-mistaken-bitcoin-transaction

As long that miner would really be willing to give it back (which is likely) then i do agree that it wont really be that
bad on giving some $10k tip but i highly doubt that. lol

Thanks for sharing.
It makes sense now, given the huge number of transactions associated with that address, it was much more likely that it was a business rather than an individual sender.
So most likely they were using their own, buggy software to send transactions and calculate fees. Anyhow, it all looks like the story will reach a happy end.

[tinfoil hat]Or maybe it's all just a marketing stunt to advertise the services of Paxos and F2Pool[/tinfoil hat]

[albert0bsd]

[tinfoil hat]Or maybe it's all just a marketing stunt to advertise the services of Paxos and F2Pool[/tinfoil hat]

Somone can said that there is no such thing as bad advertising.

But in this case the reputation of Paxos may be a little damage no? Or maybe not, the regulars users wont even notice this kind of news.

 

Regards!

[NotATether]

Breaking: It was PayPal who overpaid $500k on transaction fees:

He or She must be drunk will setting up that transaction since imagine how huge the fee he set up then for sure he is now so bothered with the money he lost out of that transaction. He should at least check the mempool to see what is the recommended fee to make his transaction fast but crazy things happen I guess this serves a lesson for him and for people which read his story since this is really a painful mistake done by holder.

Suddenly I feel less sympathetic for them. After all these years of limiting people's accounts for buying bitcoins and badmouthing BTC, now they got a taste of how bitter their own punishment really is. Of course, nobody deserves to lose $500k BTC to miners. It is now highly unlikely they will ever see that BTC from F2Pool again.

[pawel7777]

Breaking: It was PayPal who overpaid $500k on transaction fees:

According to the cointelegraph article. linked by Lanatsa above:
https://cointelegraph.com/news/paxos-confirms-responsible-for-500k-mistaken-bitcoin-transaction it was not PayPal (as many initially thought) but Paxos, who (allegedly) admitted to CoinTelegraph that the mistake was their own.

[eaLiTy]

The bitcoin fees market is getting out of control. Someone must've been really in a hurry as they paid BTC19.82 (~$511,000) fee just to send $2k worth.
Jokes aside, probably a very painful mistake. I wonder how's it going to unfold and whether the miner will return it to the unlucky sender.

Wonder which wallet they are using to make these kind of blunders. I have used majority of the desktop wallets that are available in this space and you cannot make these silly mistakes using them, unless you use some mobile wallet and you are under the influence of alcohol or something similar you might make these mistakes.

~
 but Paxos, who (allegedly) admitted to CoinTelegraph that the mistake was their own.

Not sure how they can make these blunders .

[albert0bsd]

Wonder which wallet they are using to make these kind of blunders. I have used majority of the desktop wallets that are available in this space and you cannot make these silly mistakes using them, unless you use some mobile wallet and you are under the influence of alcohol or something similar you might make these mistakes.

Those were automated transactions and the bug is actually weird the wallet had more than 60 thoussand transactions and as far we known this is the only mistake made by it.

 

What happend? well it should be nice heard that from those who work for Paxos to known what caused this error. As developer this should be more interesting.

Regards!

[franky1]

F2Pool have said they will hold the funds for three days and return them to the rightful owner if claimed: https://nitter.cz/satofishi/status/1701042302238724512#m

So, turns out it was PayPal which made this error: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/markets/paypal-reportedly-overpaid-510750-in-the-largest-usd-bitcoin-transaction-fee-ever-

Source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/paxos-confirms-responsible-for-500k-mistaken-bitcoin-transaction

ok now some highlights
F2pool said it would refund claimant.. yet easiet trick in the book is send funds back to the key of UTXO that spent it
[spoiler: f2pool didnt do the obvious refund trick]

instead f2pool co-mingled the fee overspend with its other coin rewards
https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/transactions/btc/12539f2c4a6f02bde482b730fea98a8980669bea4da9dd99db69aa6d2999a989
[spoiler: it didnt separate the funds for easy management.. but heaped it together with normal cold/hotwallets funds]
1GX28yLjVWux7ws4UQ9FB4MnLH4UKTPK2z (f2pool2 hotwallet for distribution)
1KFHE7w8BhaENAswwryaoccDb6qcT6DbYY (f2pool2 coldwallet for hoarding)

so paxos admits to failure thus making claim. yet f2pool has not made any 19btc payout to any entity at the 3day deadline
the most f2pool paid outwardly is ~17btc, but this ~17btc is a 14% take it always takes when distributing funds in ~127btc lumps of payouts.
https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/transactions/btc/bf3c5bc342eea3ab0d2e6ab34b12674aaaf400074a24157832c23555ee31528e
https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/btc/339PiqWnq6WcbXHb91PXfu4q18L9AiZDhK

[m2017]

The bitcoin fees market is getting out of control. Someone must've been really in a hurry as they paid BTC19.82 (~$511,000) fee just to send $2k worth.
Jokes aside, probably a very painful mistake. I wonder how's it going to unfold and whether the miner will return it to the unlucky sender.

Source:
Explorers: https://twitter.com/whale_alert/status/1700920065934213256
Blockstream: https://blockstream.info/tx/d5392d474b4c436e1c9d1f4ff4be5f5f9bb0eb2e26b61d2781751474b7e870fd?expand
Blockchain.com: https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/transactions/btc/d5392d474b4c436e1c9d1f4ff4be5f5f9bb0eb2e26b61d2781751474b7e870fd

I doubt it's an act of carelessness, anyone with that kind of a balance would at least know how and where to input the appropriate fees. It could be a way to donate a large sum to the bitcoin miners.

Here's a tx from 2016 that paid a 291.24 btc fee: https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/transactions/btc/cc455ae816e6cdafdb58d54e35d4f46d860047458eacf1c7405dc634631c570d this fee was worth 130k USD at that time as the BTC price was close to $441. Looking back now, this fee is worth 7.5m USD.

Of course, this is not carelessness and negligence at all. Have to be blind or mentally retarded (I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings or offend) for the sender to make such a mistake with the numbers. A person dealing with bitcoin is probably not one of them, if sender managed to figure out how it works.

For likers of alternative versions. It could also be a way to launder money! Bitcoin pull will later return most of the btc fees clean and fresh mined bitcoins. Why not, right?

[franky1]

For likers of alternative versions. It could also be a way to launder money! Bitcoin pull will later return most of the btc fees clean and fresh mined bitcoins. Why not, right?

smart people who would use a mining pool to launder. would not pre-broadcast a tx to the entire network first. they would pushtx privately to a contracted mining pool thats in on the service.

then yes the pool would destroy the taint of the UTXO (destroy coin-age) and due to fee then being a "new coin reward" which would be part of new zero taint amount.. the pool would hand back to claimant funds as fresh coin..

however because the tx was broadcast publicly pre-confirm to the entire network. the sender had no control over which pool would collate it into their block. thus less logic/reason to believe it was a planned laundering

logically if you follow the data, its more likely a bad-practice of error (human or wallet code), making a tx which didnt spend funds properly thus leaving such a high fee due to not spending funds to enough outputs

[pawel7777]

Wonder which wallet they are using to make these kind of blunders. I have used majority of the desktop wallets that are available in this space and you cannot make these silly mistakes using them, unless you use some mobile wallet and you are under the influence of alcohol or something similar you might make these mistakes.

They must've been using their own software and probably didn't have any proper measures, i.e. detection of unusually high fee etc.

so paxos admits to failure thus making claim. yet f2pool has not made any 19btc payout to any entity at the 3day deadline

I think the 3 day deadline was just for the sender to get in touch with them. Verifying, assessing risks and refunding could take longer than that. Plus BTC is fungible (the Monero crowd would disagree), so they can send it from/to any address.
I still can't wrap my head around on how can F2pool make such bold gesture without consulting with the miners' first, they should be entitled to the share of that fee after all.  

[franky1]

Wonder which wallet they are using to make these kind of blunders. I have used majority of the desktop wallets that are available in this space and you cannot make these silly mistakes using them, unless you use some mobile wallet and you are under the influence of alcohol or something similar you might make these mistakes.

They must've been using their own software and probably didn't have any proper measures, i.e. detection of unusually high fee etc.

so paxos admits to failure thus making claim. yet f2pool has not made any 19btc payout to any entity at the 3day deadline

I think the 3 day deadline was just for the sender to get in touch with them. Verifying, assessing risks and refunding could take longer than that. Plus BTC is fungible (the Monero crowd would disagree), so they can send it from/to any address.
I still can't wrap my head around on how can F2pool make such bold gesture without consulting with the miners' first, they should be entitled to the share of that fee after all.  

i wouldnt say bold(bald) i would say its a hairy situation for miners.
but miners are slaves to pools management. which is something miners should consider when thinking about which pool to be managed under. after all this may open up the other people saying they want refunds too because they paid too much fee after the fact, even on small satoshi amounts (though personally i think pools would ignore the small penny pinching refund claims and only do this gesture on obviously large mistakes)

but as for your "fungible" thing.. bitcoin is not fungible.
f2pool have transparent list of its addresses of its hot and cold wallet. and so far. even if they are not using the taint path of the coin fee spend error in new reward. they have not used any other coinrewards lump in their f2pool hoard yet

[cafter]

snip

do transactions like in this thread when a person mistakenly paid higher fees without knowing about it will get refund from miners?
to get the refund we need to send any request by messaging or emailing or it have any other platform? who will give the refund the pool if the transaction was verified by that pool or when the transaction is verified by an unknown miner then how can anyone will request for a refund and where will he find that unknown miner? what if the miner denied to pay the refund? like if we lost our money then we can complaint to police, is there any authority in this type of case?
do the huge mistakenly sent transaction fee also shared between every miner of that pool?

sorry for too many questions but you explain in understandable way so i asked.

[franky1]

do transactions like in this thread when a person mistakenly paid higher fees without knowing about it will get refund from miners?
to get the refund we need to send any request by messaging or emailing or it have any other platform? who will give the refund the pool if the transaction was verified by that pool or when the transaction is verified by an unknown miner then how can anyone will request for a refund and where will he find that unknown miner? what if the miner denied to pay the refund? like if we lost our money then we can complaint to police, is there any authority in this type of case?
do the huge mistakenly sent transaction fee also shared between every miner of that pool?

sorry for too many questions but you explain in understandable way so i asked.

there is no rule that says a pool should. its purely the morals and generosity of the pool to decide

as for claims. usually a erroneous sender has to contact the pool directly to plead, request, ask, beg for a refund..
where if generous, the pool would agree for the erroneous sender to sign a private message using the spending key to prove ownership of the spent funds. then the pool decides on its generosity (0%-10%-90%100%)

the miners(individual worker asics) dont have a say. its purely pool decision

[o_e_l_e_o]

F2Pool owner is now asking the community what they should do with the funds: https://nitter.cz/satofishi/status/1702095123981738437#m

Given how much PayPal are more than happy to screw over regular people for literally no reason whatsoever, I have no strong feelings either way what happens here.

do transactions like in this thread when a person mistakenly paid higher fees without knowing about it will get refund from miners?

No. You rely entirely on the good will of the mining pool operator, and they are under no obligation whatsoever to refund the fees.

or when the transaction is verified by an unknown miner then how can anyone will request for a refund and where will he find that unknown miner?

You can't, unless you can look at the address they received the block reward to and somehow track them down from that.

what if the miner denied to pay the refund? like if we lost our money then we can complaint to police, is there any authority in this type of case?

You can't contact the police because the miner did not steal anything. They simply mined your transaction, the fee of which you chose. If you chose the wrong fee, then that's your fault.

do the huge mistakenly sent transaction fee also shared between every miner of that pool?

Up to the pool operator, but generally yes.

[Synchronice]

Of course, this is not carelessness and negligence at all. Have to be blind or mentally retarded (I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings or offend) for the sender to make such a mistake with the numbers. A person dealing with bitcoin is probably not one of them, if sender managed to figure out how it works.

It's hilarious that people who don't know how to save money, people who make such mistakes, are millionaires.

For likers of alternative versions. It could also be a way to launder money! Bitcoin pull will later return most of the btc fees clean and fresh mined bitcoins. Why not, right?

No, that would be the dumbest thing to do, even dumber than this mistake. This transaction gained a huge attention, right? So, if the person wanted to launder money, why would he/she make a transaction that would cause such a big attention? Now everyone knows about this transaction. Personally, I exclude that it was done for laundering.

F2Pool owner is now asking the community what they should do with the funds: https://nitter.cz/satofishi/status/1702095123981738437#m

Given how much PayPal are more than happy to screw over regular people for literally no reason whatsoever, I have no strong feelings either way what happens here.

There was a very interesting comment on that post that I want to quote:

If it's 100% verified that it was them and it was a clear mistake (which seems pretty obvious), then I'd avoid any civil disputes. Although, the neutrality of the network could be called to question in the future. I think a 50/50 split shows miner good faith while also punishing the mistake. It should be made clear that this is an act of kindness, not obligation, extended by the miners.

[decodx]

F2Pool owner is now asking the community what they should do with the funds: https://nitter.cz/satofishi/status/1702095123981738437#m

Given how much PayPal are more than happy to screw over regular people for literally no reason whatsoever, I have no strong feelings either way what happens here.

So is it PayPal or Paxos? According to a Cointelegraph article, Paxos admitted that they screwed up the transaction. But don't worry, they can just "print" more Pax dollars to cover the loss! 

[cafter]

F2Pool owner is now asking the community what they should do with the funds: https://nitter.cz/satofishi/status/1702095123981738437#m

Given how much PayPal are more than happy to screw over regular people for literally no reason whatsoever, I have no strong feelings either way what happens here.

So is it PayPal or Paxos? According to a Cointelegraph article, Paxos admitted that they screwed up the transaction. But don't worry, they can just "print" more Pax dollars to cover the loss! 

He taken an example of paypal, means something paypal is doing with people is way bad than those 19BTC or 500K.
I also didn't know what paypal is doing that is not good. can you please tell us what you are talking about paypal @o_e_l_e_o?

[nelson4lov]

I doubt it's an act of carelessness, anyone with that kind of a balance would at least know how and where to input the appropriate fees. It could be a way to donate a large sum to the bitcoin miners.

Here's a tx from 2016 that paid a 291.24 btc fee: https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/transactions/btc/cc455ae816e6cdafdb58d54e35d4f46d860047458eacf1c7405dc634631c570d this fee was worth 130k USD at that time as the BTC price was close to $441. Looking back now, this fee is worth 7.5m USD.

It might be a honest mistake maybe the user in question was in a hurry and didn't confirm all inputs to the transactions. For all we know, both cases might have been a mistake because I doubt the possibility of someone paying that much when the value being sent out is around 3/100 of the gas fee?  It can happen to anybody this is why it's a recommended practice to strictly verify all inputs before a transactions is sent out and broadcasted to a network.

Edit: Paxos have confirmed that they did the transaction and that it was a mistake: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/crypto-miners-debate-500k-bitcoin-063851495.html

Although they didn't disclose how it happened, my best guess  is that they made the transaction programmatically rather than a manual input.

[franky1]

sounds like paypal owned funds stored in paxos, where paypal wanted to withdraw small amount from paxos, but paxos(the withdrawal service) sent out the small withdrawal amount but using a large utxo without using a change address for remaining unspent output balance

[philipma1957]

sounds like paypal owned funds stored in paxos, where paypal wanted to withdraw small amount from paxos, but paxos(the withdrawal service) sent out the small withdrawal amount but using a large utxo without using a change address for remaining unspent output balance

yep.

f2pool should upcharge at least 2 coins.

 i am in a very small pool that hits a block every 2 or 3 years.

I usually get 40% of the block and fees.

So 6+19=25 x 40% is 10 coins. about 7.2 would be the extra fee.

the other two miners in this pool would get

12 and 3 coins

pool is set up to auto send when block is hit so I would handle the ten coins. about 7.2 should go back to them.

but I would have to get a lawyer and special tax letters so That the irs does not try to tax the 7.2 I return.

[o_e_l_e_o]

Personally, I exclude that it was done for laundering.

The transaction was broadcast publicly. It absolutely was not done for money laundering purposes.

I also didn't know what paypal is doing that is not good. can you please tell us what you are talking about paypal @o_e_l_e_o?

You can find thousands of examples of people having their accounts frozen and money seized while PayPal provide zero reasons why and also provide zero assistance. There was also the big issue recently where they changed their terms to allow them to confiscate users' money if those users said anything online that PayPal disagrees with: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5416501.0


But anyway, the money has been refunded to Paxos: https://mempool.space/tx/1b9adb2878fce5cd1b6a11a011e3965f904829228d57cf90ca6731cd501890c6

[AHOYBRAUSE]

Edit: Paxos have confirmed that they did the transaction and that it was a mistake: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/crypto-miners-debate-500k-bitcoin-063851495.html

I was wondering if the story of who actually did this will have come to light and here we have it.
Actually I am relieved that it wasn't a private person that didn't lose all their saving because of such a silly mistake because this could ruin you.
I also made costly mistakes years ago that still haunt me sometimes but something in this range would just devastating!

[Synchronice]

sounds like paypal owned funds stored in paxos, where paypal wanted to withdraw small amount from paxos, but paxos(the withdrawal service) sent out the small withdrawal amount but using a large utxo without using a change address for remaining unspent output balance

That's actually what happened and as I was expecting, Paxos said: This only impacted Paxos corporate operations, Paxos clients and end users have not been affected and all customer funds are safe.^[source]
They can't take care of their funds but they can take care of our funds, this sounds so funny.

By the way, if I were F2Pool owner, I wouldn't refund transaction fees to Paxos. If it was a random guy, okay, I would be kind but financial institutes like PayPal and its partner Paxos, they deserve to pay for their mistakes. There is absolutely no reason for F2Pool to refund, who is here to determine whether that fee was a mistake or not? The fact is, you are the one who chooses to pay fees. I can make a transaction with $1000 fee and then cry and ask for refund, I can make a transaction with $10 fee and do the same. Also, the result of Twitter vote was Distribute it to miners.

Personally, I exclude that it was done for laundering.

The transaction was broadcast publicly. It absolutely was not done for money laundering purposes.

Yes, that's what I am saying. It wasn't done for money laundering purpose because not only it was broadcasted publicly, absolutely every person would understand that such a huge mining fees would attract everyone's attention and would make the transaction one of the most known one, blockchain is a public book of transactions after all.

[FatFork]

But anyway, the money has been refunded to Paxos: https://mempool.space/tx/1b9adb2878fce5cd1b6a11a011e3965f904829228d57cf90ca6731cd501890c6

It's such a weird thing to witness a transaction of this magnitude with a big fat zero fee attached to it. Take that, PayPal! 

[yazher]

This is actually one of the very best definitions of shit happens. We all know how people can be dumb in the crypto industry when they don't realize what they are about to do and this is one example of it. that's why we always recommend people take preventive measures in order to save them from these kinds of accidents and there is no turning back with this because there is no undo in the Bitcoin transactions.

[darkangel11]

By the way, if I were F2Pool owner, I wouldn't refund transaction fees to Paxos. If it was a random guy, okay, I would be kind but financial institutes like PayPal and its partner Paxos, they deserve to pay for their mistakes. There is absolutely no reason for F2Pool to refund, who is here to determine whether that fee was a mistake or not? The fact is, you are the one who chooses to pay fees. I can make a transaction with $1000 fee and then cry and ask for refund, I can make a transaction with $10 fee and do the same. Also, the result of Twitter vote was Distribute it to miners.

And I'd subtract a finder's fee and return the rest. We should promote fair play in bitcoin and show the world that it's not every man for himself and not all of us are here to take each other's money.
I agree, Paxos made a mistake and they should pay for it, but why would we punish them so hard? Take 10% fee from them and return the rest. Their reputation is tarnished by this whole thing anyway, let's not kick them when they're down.

[Z-tight]

We should promote fair play in bitcoin and show the world that it's not every man for himself and not all of us are here to take each other's money.

Tx fee attached to a transaction is for the miner who adds the transaction to a block, it is the miners money. If you decide to or mistakenly send more than you should, it is still the miners money and that's the fee you agreed to pay for your tx to be mined. If one overpays in tx fees and the miner refuses to refund the excess amount, it isn't stealing or taking someone else's money.

[Silberman]

We should promote fair play in bitcoin and show the world that it's not every man for himself and not all of us are here to take each other's money.

Tx fee attached to a transaction is for the miner who adds the transaction to a block, it is the miners money. If you decide to or mistakenly send more than you should, it is still the miners money and that's the fee you agreed to pay for your tx to be mined. If one overpays in tx fees and the miner refuses to refund the excess amount, it isn't stealing or taking someone else's money.

Agreed, if the miners which mined such block are generous enough to return the money then the person that made such a mistake should be glad this was the case and consider themselves lucky this could be solved so easily, however we must not forget that things are never that simple, miners pay taxes and such a huge incoming sum of money could cause them problems and increase the taxes they will have to pay and have nothing to show for it if they returned it.

[serveria.com]

Of course, this is not carelessness and negligence at all. Have to be blind or mentally retarded (I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings or offend) for the sender to make such a mistake with the numbers. A person dealing with bitcoin is probably not one of them, if sender managed to figure out how it works.

It's hilarious that people who don't know how to save money, people who make such mistakes, are millionaires.

In fact, I've read somewhere that it was a bot or some kind of system sending coins. Not sure if this is true or not, but in this case the devs should have been hanged by the balls by the management. So, blind, mentally retarded or a bot... 

[KingsDen]

This is actually one of the very best definitions of shit happens. We all know how people can be dumb in the crypto industry when they don't realize what they are about to do and this is one example of it. that's why we always recommend people take preventive measures in order to save them from these kinds of accidents and there is no turning back with this because there is no undo in the Bitcoin transactions.

I remember years ago when I was a newbie here and also in the crypto industry. I asked a question from the novice poit of view and today I have seen it happen. I asked what happens if transaction fees is a way high, very higher than the amount of bitcoin that is been transacted. I remember I recieved an answer that the wallets are designed in such a way that such transactions will not go through. I didn't ask further questions because I didn't have enough knowledge to ask. Today it has just happened and I do not think there will be any kind of refund anywhere.

[Z-tight]

Today it has just happened and I do not think there will be any kind of refund anywhere.

F2Pool have already refunded the excess payment to Paxos.

[philipma1957]

Personally, I exclude that it was done for laundering.

The transaction was broadcast publicly. It absolutely was not done for money laundering purposes.

I also didn't know what paypal is doing that is not good. can you please tell us what you are talking about paypal @o_e_l_e_o?

You can find thousands of examples of people having their accounts frozen and money seized while PayPal provide zero reasons why and also provide zero assistance. There was also the big issue recently where they changed their terms to allow them to confiscate users' money if those users said anything online that PayPal disagrees with: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5416501.0


But anyway, the money has been refunded to Paxos: https://mempool.space/tx/1b9adb2878fce5cd1b6a11a011e3965f904829228d57cf90ca6731cd501890c6

I figured they would refund.

It does bring an interesting issue for a small pool.

https://pool.laurentiapool.org/#/work

if this small pool had hit it . the software auto sends to the four addresses that have mined to it.

so that 25 coin block would go to four people. take 180 blocks to clear.  and paypal/paxos would need to talk to four people to get a refund. not the pool but the four that mine to it.

I live in U.S.A.  I would not be able to simply return the 7 or so extra coins I got.  My address is registered and is kyc. thus it would look like I had a large taxable income.

[albert0bsd]

It does bring an interesting issue for a small pool.

I wonder if this kind of actions would bring or open something like a "precedent" for other situations

It is not the first time that a return of this type has been done, but the media coverage that this particular case has captured the attention of the financial, technological and general bitcoin community.

The worry is that if we allow this now, it might lead to more situations like it in the future. Think about a situation where someone comes with arguments like Craig Wright did againts bitcoin developers, saying that miners should be responsible for users losses or helping them to recover their lost wallets...

Just image that. 

My recommendation to miners would be not to return anything to people/corporations they need learn from their mistakes.

Regards!

[Cricktor]

If I were a miner on F2pool I'd be rather pissed by the refund to Paxos that has been transfered back to them even with zero tx fee.

So, why the TwiXXer poll, why ignore the poll's result? Care to explain, F2pool? Paxos failed programmatically because their likely lausy software didn't cover some edge cases. It's clearly their fault or whatever edge conditions lead to the faulty transaction with an exorbitant fee. Obviously there were no sanity checks for unreasonably high fees.

If it were some fat finger Bitcoin noob, well, the pool might consider to be generous and refund maybe 50% and distribute the other 50% rightfully to its miners. (A Bitcoin noob who was able to acquire ~20BTC isn't likely of the poor species.)

This all went somehow too smooth, but hey, it was a nice talk of the town, PayPal, Paxos and F2pool had their publicity share. Who cares if it was good or bad in the eyes of PR. I'm kind of torn between disappointment and mild amusement about this exceptional blockchain event. And Paxos? Well, they say, your funds are safu... Sure, with such software quality... I get it!

[Z-tight]

I wonder if this kind of actions would bring or open something like a "precedent" for other situations

It wouldn't, it is clear to everyone who understands how BTC works that tx fees attached to a tx is for the miners, and in the case of an overpayment the miner has the right to keep their reward in fees or return it if they want to, whatever they decide to do is up to them and is 'right'. Situations of huge overpayments rarely happens anyway, so what i think is that as this very case with Paxos was widely covered, it will teach people to use good wallets to make tx's and also to double check everything before broadcasting.

[fruktik]

I was wondering if the story of who actually did this will have come to light and here we have it.
Actually I am relieved that it wasn't a private person that didn't lose all their saving because of such a silly mistake because this could ruin you.
I also made costly mistakes years ago that still haunt me sometimes but something in this range would just devastating!

Well, who hasn’t made such mistakes related to cryptocurrency transfers? It seems to me that this number of people is quite large. I would be surprised if it was otherwise. Still, this is a new technology that should be carefully studied, and without practical personal experience this is impossible.
This is probably why the government is trying to protect citizens from hasty conclusions about this whole area.
To this day, similar mistakes are made, but this will be an experience not only for those who made them, but also for everyone else.

[Lida93]

I wonder if this kind of actions would bring or open something like a "precedent" for other situations

It wouldn't, it is clear to everyone who understands how BTC works that tx fees attached to a tx is for the miners, and in the case of an overpayment the miner has the right to keep their reward in fees or return it if they want to, whatever they decide to do is up to them and is 'right'.

Did you just say it's their right! Such right, Is it ideal? What's the ethical or moral philosophy behind that right in keeping what doesn't count as yours.

We understand that clarity about tx fees for miners but when you receive what's above your pay cheque especially to that range of amount of tx fees it will be reputable to return it to the owner as it could be an act of error, and no one is above error.

One good turn deserves another. If that of 2016 mistake was returned then this should also be returned too.

[Z-tight]

Did you just say it's their right! Such right, Is it ideal? What's the ethical or moral philosophy behind that right in keeping what doesn't count as yours.

Yes i said so, it is their right to return an overpayment or not, it is their reward in fees and surely it is their right to do what they want with it. Take note that whatever fee attached to a mined tx now belongs to the miner, it counts as theirs and no longer belongs to whomever made the tx. It is just like saying you overpaid when sending BTC's to someone, and now you want some of the output back, it is the goodwill of the recipient to either keep the money or send them back to you, it isn't in the rights of the sender to enforce that refund.

We understand that clarity about tx fees for miners but when you receive what's above your pay cheque especially to that range of amount of tx fees it will be reputable to return it to the owner as it could be an act of error, and no one is above error.

How can miners verify it was a mistake, anybody can come out and claim a mistake. Take note that there is no exact "paycheque" for miners, just take a look at some ordinals tx's and the fees attached to them, whatever tx fee attached to a tx will be taken by the miner as what you wish to pay. True that no one is above mistake, but it is better to let people know the truth so they can double or triple check next time they are about to hit that broadcast button.

[Synchronice]

I figured they would refund.

It does bring an interesting issue for a small pool.

https://pool.laurentiapool.org/#/work

if this small pool had hit it . the software auto sends to the four addresses that have mined to it.

so that 25 coin block would go to four people. take 180 blocks to clear.  and paypal/paxos would need to talk to four people to get a refund. not the pool but the four that mine to it.

I live in U.S.A.  I would not be able to simply return the 7 or so extra coins I got.  My address is registered and is kyc. thus it would look like I had a large taxable income.

Actually, no miner has to refund any transaction fee, even if it's 1000 bitcoins, simply no miner has to do that because there is no limit to bitcoin transaction fees since it's dynamic and fees are manually set from 1 to infinite, you can modify it the way you wish. So, I assume, no one can force any miner to refund, it's absolutely your gesture of goodwill to refund it.
To be honest, asking for refund of transaction fees looks like asking for refund of bitcoins that you sent to wrong address. If I send bitcoins to wrong address that doesn't exist, who is going to refund? This is nature of bitcoin, so, your wrong transaction fees should be taken over like wrongly sent bitcoins or lost bitcoins.

[o_e_l_e_o]

The mining pool could quite easily keep it for themselves. They haven't done anything wrong, and are just keeping the fee for a transaction which was broadcast to the network. Similarly, the mining pool could be anonymous, or it could have already distributed it to all its miners. Good luck contacting hundreds of anonymous miners and begging them to each give back 0.01 BTC.

Returning an overpaid fee should very much not be treated as the norm. Otherwise I could just overpay any transaction I need confirmed and then claim back the fee after it is confirmed? I suspect F2Pool only did it because PayPal and Paxos are the kind of scummy, ammoral entities to start blaming others for their own mistakes and start legal proceedings against these completely innocent third parties.

[philipma1957]

I figured they would refund.

It does bring an interesting issue for a small pool.

https://pool.laurentiapool.org/#/work

if this small pool had hit it . the software auto sends to the four addresses that have mined to it.

so that 25 coin block would go to four people. take 180 blocks to clear.  and paypal/paxos would need to talk to four people to get a refund. not the pool but the four that mine to it.

I live in U.S.A.  I would not be able to simply return the 7 or so extra coins I got.  My address is registered and is kyc. thus it would look like I had a large taxable income.

Actually, no miner has to refund any transaction fee, even if it's 1000 bitcoins, simply no miner has to do that because there is no limit to bitcoin transaction fees since it's dynamic and fees are manually set from 1 to infinite, you can modify it the way you wish. So, I assume, no one can force any miner to refund, it's absolutely your gesture of goodwill to refund it.
To be honest, asking for refund of transaction fees looks like asking for refund of bitcoins that you sent to wrong address. If I send bitcoins to wrong address that doesn't exist, who is going to refund? This is nature of bitcoin, so, your wrong transaction fees should be taken over like wrongly sent bitcoins or lost bitcoins.

Like I said that small pool above will send me the fees which in the case of this error would be 7 or 8 coins of the 19 extra paid.

7 to 8 coins is very close to 200k.

 I live in USA I report my mining my taxes due would be over 50k on that 200k close to 60k tax maybe 65k.

The pool above will send it to me automatically it will be in my hands. so I have a tax issue.

Another pool that could have done this is solo ckpool. you hit the block you get it all automatically.

So you would have 24 or 25 coins in hand.


f2pool most likely would freeze it and it would never go into the hands of the miners. so zero tax issues

[pawel7777]

F2Pool owner is now asking the community what they should do with the funds: https://nitter.cz/satofishi/status/1702095123981738437#m

They should've asked before declaring they would refund it. And looks like he was just having a laugh with that poll. Despite the majority voting against it, apparently they did the right thing and returned that fee anyway:

what if the miner denied to pay the refund? like if we lost our money then we can complaint to police, is there any authority in this type of case?

You can't contact the police because the miner did not steal anything. They simply mined your transaction, the fee of which you chose. If you chose the wrong fee, then that's your fault.

That's actually quite interesting from the legal point of view. As much as it's not something that would be reportable to police, depending on the jurisdiction, you could still take the miner to the civil court with a chance of winning.

[o_e_l_e_o]

Despite the majority voting against it, apparently they did the right thing and returned that fee anyway:

Who's to say it was the right thing to do? Whenever the average user makes a mistake and over pays their fee, they simply have to wave goodbye to their money. Why should it be different for Paxos?

Average people getting screwed while corporations do what they like is all too reminiscent of fiat.

depending on the jurisdiction, you could still take the miner to the civil court with a chance of winning.

And impossible to enforce. If the pool operator has already distributed the fee to the miners, then they have nothing to pay back. And if they were to start skimming a percentage off all future blocks to repay it, then their miners would simply switch to a different pool.

[Synchronice]

That's actually quite interesting from the legal point of view. As much as it's not something that would be reportable to police, depending on the jurisdiction, you could still take the miner to the civil court with a chance of winning.

I bet 99.9999999% if not 100% of lawyers and judges have absolutely no idea about how bitcoin mining and blockchain network works. This would be the case where they'll have to judge what they don't know and won't be able to understand which argument is right or wrong.
We aren't students of school of law but we can logically say that there is absolutely zero chance that miner is guilty. It's miners duty to mine bitcoin block and keep mining fees. I would even say that if miner agrees to return fees to someone, they are probably part of money laundering. Why? Because, why would someone pay half a billion in fees and then ask miner for return? To launder money, that's how they do that. We can argue on this, right? Sure. But the best judge in this case is Bitcoin Whitepaper, it doesn't say that we should return fees to transaction makers. Instead, miners should keep them, it's their property.

Despite the majority voting against it, apparently they did the right thing and returned that fee anyway:

Who's to say it was the right thing to do? Whenever the average user makes a mistake and over pays their fee, they simply have to wave goodbye to their money. Why should it be different for Paxos?

Average people getting screwed while corporations do what they like is all too reminiscent of fiat.

The most interesting part is, what would happen if they didn't return fee? What would PayPal and Paxos do? Would this motivate them to immediately start demarketing of Bitcoin and decentralized Proof Of Work? Probably it was a right choice this time because these big corporations have enormous power, it would make F2Pool and others to look bad and PayPal would try to market itself even better and socially step up because as you know, people are naive and lack critical thinking. Otherwise, I totally agree with you, big corporations should pay! Always!

[Z-tight]

The most interesting part is, what would happen if they didn't return fee? What would PayPal and Paxos do? Would this motivate them to immediately start demarketing of Bitcoin and decentralized Proof Of Work?

They can't demarket BTC if the miners had kept the fee, even if they wanted to do it. BTC's isn't centralized, and anyone with understanding of how it works knows there is no way to enforce a refund or reversal of payment in the BTC's network, unlike in centralized payment systems and centralized crypto. So even if they were going to publish negative info or articles about BTC, it won't change anything, institutions and the media have been doing that for a long time to deceive only the gullible.

Probably it was a right choice this time because these big corporations have enormous power, it would make F2Pool and others to look bad and PayPal would try to market itself even better and socially step up because as you know, people are naive and lack critical thinking. Otherwise, I totally agree with you, big corporations should pay! Always!

Yeah people are naive, but if they believe mining or POW is bad because miners kept the fee you attached to your tx, but paypal is 'good'  'better' when they freeze and confiscate people's funds and could probably seize your money if you make posts that "hurt their feelings" online, then there's nothing you can do to help these kind of people, and maybe BTC wasn't meant for them at all.

[Latviand]

I bet 99.9999999% if not 100% of lawyers and judges have absolutely no idea about how bitcoin mining and blockchain network works. This would be the case where they'll have to judge what they don't know and won't be able to understand which argument is right or wrong.
We aren't students of school of law but we can logically say that there is absolutely zero chance that miner is guilty. It's miners duty to mine bitcoin block and keep mining fees. I would even say that if miner agrees to return fees to someone, they are probably part of money laundering. Why? Because, why would someone pay half a billion in fees and then ask miner for return? To launder money, that's how they do that. We can argue on this, right? Sure. But the best judge in this case is Bitcoin Whitepaper, it doesn't say that we should return fees to transaction makers. Instead, miners should keep them, it's their property.

How are you so sure that there's nil lawyers would have no idea about this kind of case? Is your superiority complex that bad that you think that other people that don't have an inkling of knowledge or their interests are outside of bitcoin don't have the idea what they can do with this? They don't need to know it, the clients and the defendants just need to tell the truth and everything that the court needs to know so they can make a case about it. Clearly you and I aren't a student that's involve with law but I don't just blurt conjecture with confidence. Not everything wrong with bitcoin is money laundering, it's been proven already that bitcoin's a bad cryptocurrency to use for that kind of activity.

[pawel7777]

Despite the majority voting against it, apparently they did the right thing and returned that fee anyway:

Who's to say it was the right thing to do? Whenever the average user makes a mistake and over pays their fee, they simply have to wave goodbye to their money. Why should it be different for Paxos?

Depends on your morality (or lack thereof) I guess. To me it's pretty clear. If you know that someone paid you too much in error, and it's practical and possible to refund them - you should.
If you sold a car to your friend and they accidentally wired you $20k instead of $10k, you wouldn't use "other people make mistakes and lose money permanently" as an excuse, you would send it back (I hope).

[philipma1957]

Despite the majority voting against it, apparently they did the right thing and returned that fee anyway:

Who's to say it was the right thing to do? Whenever the average user makes a mistake and over pays their fee, they simply have to wave goodbye to their money. Why should it be different for Paxos?

Depends on your morality (or lack thereof) I guess. To me it's pretty clear. If you know that someone paid you too much in error, and it's practical and possible to refund them - you should.
If you sold a car to your friend and they accidentally wired you $20k instead of $10k, you wouldn't use "other people make mistakes and lose money permanently" as an excuse, you would send it back (I hope).

Would be an ideal world 🌍.  The problem is there are so many crooked people it does not happen enough at least in this case it was fixed.

And my small pool I am in did not need to face the issue.

[o_e_l_e_o]

If you sold a car to your friend and they accidentally wired you $20k instead of $10k, you wouldn't use "other people make mistakes and lose money permanently" as an excuse, you would send it back (I hope).

That's a different scenario. We will have agreed on a price in advance, so it is clear what you sent was a mistake.

If I pay 100 sats/vbyte in fees, is that clearly a mistake? What about 200? 500? The last block contained two transactions paying over 1,000 sats/vbyte in fees, when 40 sats/vbyte would have been sufficient. Should the miner refund those transactions? Or indeed, should they refund every transaction which paid more than what was necessary? What's stopping me from making all my transactions pay 1,000 sats/vbyte and then demand that the miner return my fee?

If you send all your coins to the wrong address, no one can get them back for you. I don't see why we should expect any different if you pay too much in fees. You might get lucky and the miner in question might be feeling generous, but you definitely shouldn't work on the assumption that they will refund your fee nor that you would have any legal recourse in such a situation.

[Synchronice]

How are you so sure that there's nil lawyers would have no idea about this kind of case? Is your superiority complex that bad that you think that other people that don't have an inkling of knowledge or their interests are outside of bitcoin don't have the idea what they can do with this? They don't need to know it, the clients and the defendants just need to tell the truth and everything that the court needs to know so they can make a case about it. Clearly you and I aren't a student that's involve with law but I don't just blurt conjecture with confidence. Not everything wrong with bitcoin is money laundering, it's been proven already that bitcoin's a bad cryptocurrency to use for that kind of activity.

Seriously, watch TikTok trial courte, watch every minute of it and you'll understand why I am so confident when I say that.
Or just watch it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0QbtLh976I
Are you still sure that they'll know how bitcoin, bitcoin mining and blockchain network works in depth? They asked such a dumb questions to TikTok CEO, especially when it was truly their wish to ban TikTok and stop its operations.

Depends on your morality (or lack thereof) I guess. To me it's pretty clear. If you know that someone paid you too much in error, and it's practical and possible to refund them - you should.
If you sold a car to your friend and they accidentally wired you $20k instead of $10k, you wouldn't use "other people make mistakes and lose money permanently" as an excuse, you would send it back (I hope).

How much is too much? How are we going to set the limit where after certain satoshis, it's too much? And on individual level, probably $5 more fee is too much for me than half a million dollar for PayPal.

Car's price is fixed price while in bitcoin world, there is no fixed fee to make a transaction, that's why your argument is weak.

[pawel7777]

That's a different scenario. We will have agreed on a price in advance, so it is clear what you sent was a mistake.

If I pay 100 sats/vbyte in fees, is that clearly a mistake? What about 200? 500? The last block contained two transactions paying over 1,000 sats/vbyte in fees, when 40 sats/vbyte would have been sufficient. Should the miner refund those transactions? Or indeed, should they refund every transaction which paid more than what was necessary? What's stopping me from making all my transactions pay 1,000 sats/vbyte and then demand that the miner return my fee?

These are excuses and you know it. You ignored the parts where I mentioned: "If you know that someone paid you too much in error, and it's practical and possible to refund them". No one is talking about anyone demanding a refund, but whether it would be a moral thing to do from the recipient's perspective.
Just because it's judgmental of what the "refundable" amount would be, it doesn't mean it's the right thing to keep any amount sent in error (even if you have a legal right to do so).
Somehow nobody in this thread had any trouble recognising that 20btc was not a normal fee and it was likely sent in error.

If you send all your coins to the wrong address, no one can get them back for you.

Recipient could. If I sent all my bitcoins to your address by some weird accident, I'd like to think you would return them. Not because you have to, but because it's the right thing to do.

I don't see why we should expect any different if you pay too much in fees. You might get lucky and the miner in question might be feeling generous, but you definitely shouldn't work on the assumption that they will refund your fee nor that you would have any legal recourse in such a situation.

Nobody is saying anything about any "expectations" or about introducing any rules that miners must refund such fees.
As for legal recourse - you don't know that. I could easily imagine miner being ordered to return it in some jurisdictions.

[philipma1957]

That's a different scenario. We will have agreed on a price in advance, so it is clear what you sent was a mistake.

If I pay 100 sats/vbyte in fees, is that clearly a mistake? What about 200? 500? The last block contained two transactions paying over 1,000 sats/vbyte in fees, when 40 sats/vbyte would have been sufficient. Should the miner refund those transactions? Or indeed, should they refund every transaction which paid more than what was necessary? What's stopping me from making all my transactions pay 1,000 sats/vbyte and then demand that the miner return my fee?

These are excuses and you know it. You ignored the parts where I mentioned: "If you know that someone paid you too much in error, and it's practical and possible to refund them". No one is talking about anyone demanding a refund, but whether it would be a moral thing to do from the recipient's perspective.
Just because it's judgmental of what the "refundable" amount would be, it doesn't mean it's the right thing to keep any amount sent in error (even if you have a legal right to do so).
Somehow nobody in this thread had any trouble recognising that 20btc was not a normal fee and it was likely sent in error.

If you send all your coins to the wrong address, no one can get them back for you.

Recipient could. If I sent all my bitcoins to your address by some weird accident, I'd like to think you would return them. Not because you have to, but because it's the right thing to do.

I don't see why we should expect any different if you pay too much in fees. You might get lucky and the miner in question might be feeling generous, but you definitely shouldn't work on the assumption that they will refund your fee nor that you would have any legal recourse in such a situation.

Nobody is saying anything about any "expectations" or about introducing any rules that miners must refund such fees.
As for legal recourse - you don't know that. I could easily imagine miner being ordered to return it in some jurisdictions.

Yeah I am sure some judges in some countries would force a refund. I am also pretty sure if you are USA based there is no precedent on refunding so you would need to be very careful about taxes with a refund.

[o_e_l_e_o]

No one is talking about anyone demanding a refund, but whether it would be a moral thing to do from the recipient's perspective.

It would of course be the right thing to do from the sender's perspective. But is it the right thing to do from the individual miners' perspective? They have honestly mined a valid transaction, and now their pool operator is denying them the profits? Should it really be up to the pool operator at all? Should each individual miner not get to decide what to do with their share of the excess fee which they earned honestly?

I don't think it's as simple as "I paid too much in fees, give it back".

[franky1]

No one is talking about anyone demanding a refund, but whether it would be a moral thing to do from the recipient's perspective.

It would of course be the right thing to do from the sender's perspective. But is it the right thing to do from the individual miners' perspective? They have honestly mined a valid transaction, and now their pool operator is denying them the profits? Should it really be up to the pool operator at all? Should each individual miner not get to decide what to do with their share of the excess fee which they earned honestly?

you really dont know bitcoin do you

miners dont mine transactions
miners just hash a hash of a block

its the pool operator that manages everything. so yes they as managers decide everything

miners have no control over what transactions go into a block nor what level of fee transactions have.. pools decide all that and pools decide what pay out strategy to offer and what is deemed a valid hash, share the workers present as their work..

its like employment
workers get paid a wage decided by their boss, workers have no control over what the manager decides the product is worth when it presents the end product to a consumer.

at this moment. fees are not treated as a wage. they are treated as a gratuity bonus, the salary is the main blockreward(6.25btc)

[pawel7777]

It would of course be the right thing to do from the sender's perspective. But is it the right thing to do from the individual miners' perspective? They have honestly mined a valid transaction, and now their pool operator is denying them the profits? Should it really be up to the pool operator at all? Should each individual miner not get to decide what to do with their share of the excess fee which they earned honestly?

I 100% agree on this aspect. As I mentioned before, I can't understand how F2Pool could make such gesture without asking participating miners for permission (unless they have it covered in Terms of Service, which I doubt).
So I think refunding it is a moral thing to do in general, but everyone entitled to that fee should make that decision themselves. You can't make good deeds with other peoples money.

[franky1]

entitlement to fee's is not contractual part of miners payout. because its not the miners that decide what transactions and fee's are included in a block. a pool manager can if they want do "empty blocks" or only include transactions with 1sat.. and miners have no say.. all a miner can do is pool hop to a different pool

[tjtonmoy]

I am still uncertain what to make out of this incident. There are many possibilities as to why this happened. As long as we don't hear from the person who made that transaction we can say anything for sure. A sick joke, a way to send rewards to the miners, a case of hacking, human error, some faulty script, an old transaction getting through now, or is it Satoshi himself sending free money to people? Well, we can say many things about this but we will never know the real reason.

I guess as long as the person who made this transaction comes forward the sender and receiver can't come to a common ground whether to refund it or to keep it to themselves.

[Cricktor]

...

It has been quite likely faulty software as was already suggested earlier in this thread. The sending address has 69+k transactions and isn't very old. It doesn't look like some human doing some strange error. It would be nice and maybe a bit entertaining if Paxos would publish what kind of edge case caused this and how their error happened. Unfortunately this won't happen.

Many many thousands of transactions of this address went through without excessive transaction fees. Whatever triggered this fault, clearly there were no sanity checks by software or human controller to detect and avoid ridiculous overpaying fee or other desastrous quirks.

[Fatunad]

...

It has been quite likely faulty software as was already suggested earlier in this thread. The sending address has 60+k transactions and isn't very old. It doesn't look like some human doing some strange error. It would be nice and maybe a bit entertaining if Paxos would publish what kind of edge case caused this and how their error happened. Unfortunately this won't happen.

Many many thousands of transactions of this address went through without excessive transaction fees. Whatever triggered this fault, clearly there were no sanity checks by software or human controller to detect and avoid ridiculous overpaying fee or other desastrous quirks.

On an address which it isnt really that too old and making about 60k transaction then i would say that it isnt something a human being on having that kind of on hold and control of such address yet making those transactions which in numbers alone which you could definitely say that it is really that something automated. Majority of comments and words been read up talking about fat finger which it is really that a common issue
but just like been said that having this kind of behavior in regarding transactions then it is really that operated with software and its true that Paxos wont really be tending to make things clear about on how did
this error comes possible or something that happened because it would really be reflecting out their negligence if ever there are really some lapses when it comes to software maintenance or updates which
we know that it is really that very crucial in speaking about its function and really that getting attached with processing transactions which is something that needs to be that maintained and would be checked
out so that there would be no next problems in regarding about this.

[pawel7777]

entitlement to fee's is not contractual part of miners payout. because its not the miners that decide what transactions and fee's are included in a block. a pool manager can if they want do "empty blocks" or only include transactions with 1sat.. and miners have no say.. all a miner can do is pool hop to a different pool

What is or isn't part of "contractual" payout obligations is subject to contract (aka Terms of Service) if there's any. If the pool operator obliged themselves to share fees with participating miners, then they should do it. Whether or not miners' could take legal actions if the pool fails to do that is a different story.
Pool operator having the power to include/exclude fee is irrelevant (they have a financial incentive to do so though). If the fee is earned - it should be shared (unless agreed otherwise).