Bitcoiner Overpays $3.1 Million In Largest Ever Transaction Fee

An unknown Bitcoin (BTC) user paid an 83.6 BTC ($3,136,058) transaction fee while moving his coins on Thursday, marking the largest transaction fee the network has ever recorded in dollar terms.

The total size of the transaction was 139 BTC ($5,198,720.84), meaning less than half of the transfer (55.7 BTC) actually reached the recipient.

Another Costly Transaction Mistake

The costly transaction was sent from wallet address bc1qn3d…wekrnl to address bc1qyf…km36t4 on November 23, at Bitcoin block 818087.

According to mempool.space, the fee was overpaid by a factor of 119,980x, based on the block’s 141/sat/vb cost at the time.

On Bitcoin, users can voluntarily attach a fee to their transactions so that the network will process them faster.

Specifically, the Bitcoin miner responsible for building the network’s next block will be more incentivized to include that transaction within the block’s limited storage space, since he will earn the attached fee as a reward.

Bitcoin includes a feature for senders called “replace by fee” (RBF), with which a still unconfirmed Bitcoin transaction may be replaced by another with a higher fee attached if the first one wasn’t sufficient.

According to mempool developer @mononautical on X, the sender may not have known that RBF orders cannot be canceled, and repeatedly tried to cancel the transaction with higher fees.

The transaction’s RBF history shows that the last replacement attempt added another 20% to his transaction fee, adding 12.54 BTC in unnecessary costs.

What Will Happen To The Money?

Though the sender and recipient are still unknown, the winner of the block’s fee was Antpool – one of the world’s largest Bitcoin mining pools based in Asia.

Antpool was responsible for 29.4% of Bitcoin’s total hash rate over the past 3 days and has normally averaged 1.6 BTC in transaction fees per block, according to Hashrate Index.

Under normal circumstances, mining pool operators split profits from block rewards and fees between themselves and their constituent miners, depending on their specific contractual arrangements.

However, a similar case involving a large accidental fee sent by Paxos in September was graciously returned later by F2Pool.

“Antpool I guess would pay it back once contacted by the transactor,” wrote Blockstream CEO and Bitcoin developer Adam Back to X on Tuesday.