A bitcoin user has paid over $80,000 in transaction fees to send little over $1 in BTC, in what was seemingly a mistake on the user’s end. Blockchain data shows the transactions seems to have come from the wallet of a cryptocurrency exchange or service.
According to Blockchain.com the address that sent the transaction has received a total of over 19,490 BTC and made over 12,241 transactions but now has a balance of 0.6879 BTC, which could mean a cryptocurrency exchange or service’s wallet. In a single transaction, however, 3.49 BTC, worth over $80,000 at press time, were paid in fees to move 0.00005 BTC, worth about $1.16. The user paid a transaction fee of 459,315 satoshis per byte, far above the average fee needed for a fast transaction confirmation of 102 satoshis per byte.
The transaction was made at a time in which the average bitcoin transaction fee being paid surged from about $2.7 earlier this month to about $6, after dropping from a near $12 high. Transaction fees are going up along with the price of BTC, which recently hit a new all-time high above $24,000.
The large transaction fee was likely paid due to human error. In these cases, there is little the bitcoiners can do but contact the miner who finds the bock the transaction was inserted in, and ask them to return the transaction fee to them.
The user can confirm they own the address by signing a message on the blockchain, but whether the miner returns the funds or not is up to them. When a user accidentally attached a 2,100 ETH fee to a transaction, then worth over $300,000, the mining pool that found the block, Sparkpool, agreed to split the fee with the user.
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