Outrageous! This User Paid an 83 BTC Fee for a Single Transaction

An unknown user paid 83 BTC ($3.14 million) in fees in a transaction on Thursday. The user intended to transfer 139.4 BTC from wallet bc1qn3d7vyks0k3fx38xkxazpep8830ttmydwekrnl to bc1qyfem6z7pq3mqn7tcnn0587dhcnhkrqh8km36t4 but ended up receiving 56.7 BTC, with the rest taken as transaction fees.

As confirmed by Mempool, the user transferred using block 818087 belonging to Antpool, a leading Bitcoin mining pool. The block collected a total reward of 91.46 BTC in subsidy+fees and 85.12 BTC in fees. The 83 BTC fee is now the largest amount ever paid in transaction fees to a miner.

Lucky Day for Antpool

After the mistake happened, an attempt to fork the blockchain of the block proved abortive. At press time, the block status has turned to ‘stale’ and was reportedly replaced with one with the exact address properties.

Antpool benefited about 120,000% of the regular fees it should get from such transactions. The outrageous percentage signaled that the sender might have made an obvious mistake while sending his assets.

Will There Be a Refund?

At press time, Antpool had not realized anything concerning the transaction. Although not mandatory, such an enormous transaction fee is expected to be refunded. A similar issue happened with mining pool F2F in September, and it returned the overpaid amount to Paxos.

Paxos paid 20 BTC in transaction fees instead of 0.7 BTC while initializing a transaction. Out of goodwill, F2F decided to return 19.8 BTC to Paxos and confirmed that it had done so in a tweet on September 15.