According to a report from Cointelegraph, a Bitcoin user paid 83.7 Bitcoin (BTC) valued at $3.1 million in transaction fees for the transfer of 139.42 BTC. The transaction fee ranks as the eight-highest in 14 years since Bitcoin’s inception.
The BTC wallet address bc1qn3d…wekrnl tried transferring 139.42 BTC to bc1qyf…km36t4 on November 23rd, paying more than half the value of the Bitcoin in transaction fees. The receiving address only received 55.77 BTC. The mining pool Antpool captured the extremely large mining fee on block 818087.
Users on social media concluded that the sender probably selected the high transaction fee, but the replace-by-fee (RBF) node policy and the sender’s ignorance appear to have played a part. RBF allows an unconfirmed transaction in the mempool to be replaced with a different transaction that pays a higher
transaction fee to get it cleared earlier.
The mempool is where all Bitcoin transactions wait in line prior to approval and addition to the Bitcoin blockchain.
A mempool developer by the moniker mononaut on X (formerly Twitter) expressed that the user responsible for the transfer was likely unaware that RBF orders cannot be canceled. The user may have repeatedly replaced the fees in attempts to cancel it. The RBF history indicates that the last replacement increased the fee by another 20%, adding
12.54824636 BTC in fees.
In the past, Bitcoin users have been known to accidentally pay high transaction fees for a single Bitcoin transaction. In September, Bitcoin exchange platform Paxos accidentally sent a $500,000 transaction fee for a $2,000 Bitcoin transfer. In that event, the F2Pool miner who verified the transaction returned the $500,000 accidental transaction fee to Paxos.
Nevertheless, this is notably the biggest Bitcoin transaction fee ever paid in dollar terms, making the September Paxos transfer of $500,000 pale in comparison. The largest fee in Bitcoin terms was paid in 2016 when someone accidentally sent 291 BTC in transaction fees.
Mononaut told Cointelegraph that although the current instance of an accidental transaction fee has similarities to the Paxos case, the likelihood that Antpool would return the funds would
rely on their own payout policies, ”which might have implications for what obligations they have to share transaction fees with their miners.”
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