Someone Just Made a $47,000 Mistake With Bitcoin

By Will Gottsegen

Someone has apparently paid 2.66038352 Bitcoin (over $47,000) in fees to send a measly 0.01088549 BTC (or $194.66, when transacted).

The transaction hash is 3ba0c9eaf3185898164518cda7e3433d1d2049188d737f2b2a7e188aaeb8b4de, and the identity transferrer is unknown, as are the reasons for their throwing away all this money on a fee.

In all probability, it was a simple mistake, the result of a user setting the Bitcoin transaction fee manually. This sort of thing has happened before—someone made an even costlier blunder this past June, dropping $2.6 million in fees to send $130 in ETH. It was the highest transaction fee ever paid to transfer Ethereum. 

A previous candidate for the Ethereum record was this transaction, from February 2019, in which someone spent $450,000 on fees (that anonymous transferer later worked out the mistake with Sparkpool, the mining pool to which they’d sent the fee).

Since there was no change from the Bitcoin transaction, the blockchain explorer Blockstream suggested that it may have been a self-transfer.

According to Bitinfocharts, the average Bitcoin transaction fee is just 0.00025 BTC, or $4.45. That’s down from over $13 (a high for the year) in October. In fact, in late October, a crypto whale was able to move more than $1 billion worth of BTC from Bitcoin wallet provider Xapo to an unknown address and only pay $3 in fees for the transfer.

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