Bitcoin user pays $3.1M in transition fee for one 139 BTC transfer

cointelegraph.com:

A Bitcoin user paid 83.7 Bitcoin (BTC) worth $3.1 million in transaction fees for transferring 139.42 BTC. The transaction fee of $3.1 million is the 8th highest in Bitcoin's 14-year history.

The BTC wallet address bc1qn3d…wekrnl tried transferring 139.42 BTC to bc1qyf…km36t4 earlier on Nov. 23, only to pay more than half the actual value in the transition fee. The destination address received only 55.77 BTC. The mining pool Antpool captured the absurdly high mining fee on block 818087.

Users on social media suggested that the sender selected the high transaction fee, but Replace-By-Fee (RBF), a node policy, and the sender's unawareness also appear to have played a part. RBF allows an unconfirmed transaction in a mempool to be replaced with a different transaction that pays a higher transaction fee, in order to get it cleared earlier. Mempool is where all BTC transactions are queued before approval and addition to the Bitcoin blockchain.

A mempool developer who goes by the Twitter name of Mononaut said that the user behind the transfer probably didn’t know RBF orders cannot be canceled. The user might have replaced the fees multiple times in hopes of canceling it. The RBF history indicates that the last replacement increased the fee by another 20%, adding 12.54824636 BTC in fees.

This is not the first instance a Bitcoin user accidentally sent an absurdly high transaction fee for a single Bitcoin transaction. In September, Bitcoin exchange platform Paxos accidentally sent $500,000 in transaction fees for $2000 worth of BTC transfer. However, the f2pool miner who verified that transaction returned the $500,000 accidental transaction fee to Paxos.

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