A Bitcoin user recently paid an astonishing transaction fee of $3.1 million while transferring 139.42 BTC, marking the 8th highest fee in Bitcoin’s 14-year history. The transaction, initiated from the BTC wallet address bc1qn3d…wekrnl to bc1qyf…km36t4 on Nov. 23, resulted in the recipient receiving only 55.77 BTC, significantly less than the total transferred.
The exorbitant fee was captured by the Antpool mining pool on block 818087. Speculations on social media suggest that the user intentionally opted for a high transaction fee, but factors such as Replace-By-Fee (RBF), a node policy, and the user’s potential lack of awareness may have contributed to the incident.
RBF allows the replacement of an unconfirmed transaction in the mempool with a different one offering a higher fee to expedite clearance. The mempool serves as the queue for all BTC transactions before they are approved and added to the blockchain.
A developer known as Mononaut on X (Twitter), specializing in mempool development, indicated that the user might not have been aware that RBF orders cannot be canceled. The user may have attempted multiple fee replacements, hoping to cancel the transaction. RBF history reveals that the final replacement increased the fee by an additional 20%, amounting to 12.54824636 BTC in fees.
This incident mirrors a previous case in September where a Bitcoin exchange platform, Paxos, mistakenly sent $500,000 in transaction fees for a $2000 BTC transfer. However, the f2pool miner responsible for verifying that transaction promptly returned the accidental fee to Paxos.
Mononaut noted similarities between the current case and the Paxos incident but emphasized that the likelihood of Antpool returning the funds depends on their payout policies, raising questions about their obligations to share transaction fees with miners.