Now that’s a careless mistake that’s costing a lot of money. A few days ago, an individual mistakenly paid nearly 500,000 dollars in fees for a single transaction on Bitcoin (BTC), marking a new (and sad) record in the history of the network. Who could this be? Can he get compensation? We explain it all to you.
$500,000: Record transaction fees on Bitcoin
Monumental mistake for this whale, which carried out a record transaction in the history of the Bitcoin blockchain (BTC) on Sunday 10 September. The Whale Alert bot reported that a user spent 19.89 BTC to pay the fees for a single transaction:
A fee of 19 BTC (509,563 USD) has just been paid for a single transaction!https://t.co/sI0FSMnsiW
– Whale Alert (@whale_alert) September 10, 2023
It should be noted that the transfer in question was for a derisory amount: just 0.074 BTC, the equivalent of $1,900 at the time. It was an obvious and gross error, and it didn’t take long for the blockchain investigators to react, as they have their own theories on this incredible affair.
Internet user Jameson Lopp has revealed that this individual could in fact be a cryptocurrency exchange platform. In fact, the address in question has carried out more than 120,000 transactions in total, far too many to be a simple investor:
The transaction that paid nearly 20 BTC ($500,000) fee a few hours ago looks like an exchange or payment processor with buggy software.
They’ve received 60,000+ txns and sent 60,000+ txns from the same address (bad practice) and likely calculated their change output incorrectly. pic.twitter.com/s44Yc8S2ia
– Jameson Lopp (@lopp) September 10, 2023
So what happened? Exchanges handle a very large number of transactions every day. So they use automation software that carries out the transactions for them, by entering predefined information. Presumably, this is the source of this huge error
One man’s misfortune is another man’s gain
If there’s one person who can be happy about this error, it’s the miner who validated the block containing this transaction. He was credited with an extra 20 BTC on top of the 6.25 he traditionally receives.
However, luck finally smiled on our unfortunate individual (or exchange) as he came across the F2Pool mining pool. Aware that this transaction was an obvious mistake, the pool – through the intermediary of Wang Chun, co-founder of this miners’ cooperative – declared that the unfortunate individual had 3 days to come forward and recover the funds he had lost.
For the time being, he has not yet contacted F2Pool. Some Internet users are expressing the possibility that this potential cryptocurrency exchange did not even realise its mistake. Indeed, transactions are continuing as if nothing had happened, including asset deposits to Binance, KuCoin and other centralised platforms.
Nevertheless, this incident marks the record for fees paid on a single transaction in the history of Bitcoin. For your information, this error was made possible by the fact that the fee field is left open to the user and there is no limit, as long as the wallet is funded.
