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

[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.

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[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?