- A Bitcoin user recently paid an accidentally high transaction fee of $31 million to transfer $3.9 million worth of Bitcoin, ranking among the highest fees ever on the network.
- The likely cause was the user’s lack of awareness of Bitcoin’s replace-by-replace policy, which allows unconfirmed transactions to be replaced with higher fees. The user may have repeatedly replaced fees trying to cancel it.
- At $31 million, this surpasses a previous $500,000 accidental fee as the largest ever in dollar terms. It remains unclear if the mining pool that captured the fee will return it.
A Bitcoin user recently paid an accidentally high transaction fee of $31 million to transfer $3.9 million worth of Bitcoin. This exorbitant fee ranks among the highest in Bitcoin’s history.
The Transfer
On November 23, the Bitcoin wallet address bc1qn3dwekrnl attempted to transfer 13,942 BTC (worth around $3.9 million) to bc1qyfkm36t4. Shockingly, the transaction fee amounted to a whopping 837 BTC, totaling over $31 million. The recipient address only received 5,577 BTC after subtracting the fee.
The mining pool Antpool captured this absurdly high fee in block 818087.
The Cause
The astronomical fee appears to have been an accident caused by the user’s unawareness of Bitcoin’s replace-by-replace (RBF) policy. RBF allows unconfirmed transactions to be replaced in the mempool by a new transaction with a higher fee to get confirmed faster.
Mempool developer mononaut suggests the user likely didn’t know RBF orders can’t be canceled. The user may have repeatedly replaced the fees hoping to cancel it. The RBF history shows the last replacement hiked the fee by another 20 BTC.
Previous Accidents
This incident isn’t the first time someone paid an extremely high transaction fee by mistake. In September, Paxos accidentally paid a $500,000 fee for a 2,000 BTC transfer. In that case, the F2Pool miner returned the accidental fee.
At $31 million, this fee surpasses Paxos’ $500,000 error as the largest in dollar terms. The biggest Bitcoin fee was 291 BTC paid in 2016.
The Future
It remains unclear whether Antpool will return the accidental fee, as policies likely dictate their obligations regarding fee sharing. Antpool hasn’t yet commented on the issue.
