A Bitcoin (BTC) user spent over $200 to make a transaction, paying astronomically above the average fee.
In a transaction that entered Bitcoin block 760,077, a user paid 1,136,000 satoshis, (0.0136 BTC or $220.52) to move 3.8 BTC ($63,000). This extraordinarily high fee is 1,000 times the usual Bitcoin transaction fee, as at block height 760,077, the average transaction fee was approximately $0.20.
Twitter user Bitcoin QnA was the first to spot the unusual transaction, asking: “Cast?”. The Bitcoin educator told Cointelegraph that “Ultimately we’ll never know [por qué pagaron alto]but there are some possible answers.” QnA listed the following:
“1. Using a wallet with terrible fee estimates 2. A user who makes a mistake manually entering their fee 3. An exchange processing an urgent payment. They tend to overpay, but usually never that much.”
Finally, QnA told Cointelegraph that it could be that the user hasn’t done their homework, and the error could be explained by “a user not understanding how miner fees work (unlikely given the amounts seen in the transaction in question). .”
Transaction fees on the Bitcoin base chain range from cents to hundreds of dollars, depending on the levels of congestion in Bitcoin’s memory pool, or “mem pool,” as well as the size of transactions. Transaction fees are quoted in satoshis per data unit, abbreviated as sats/vByte.
The sats/vByte fee is multiplied by the size of the transaction made to get the total fee to be paid. Generally, the more money (or data) sent, the higher the transaction fee, although there are other factors that come into play.
If a user is in a hurry, they can choose to pay a higher sats/vByte fee to almost guarantee that miners will include their transaction in the next confirmed block. The cost of this luxury is a higher rate. The lowest rate is 1 sats/vByte; the highest rates are generally considered to be anything above 7 sats/vByte. For this fat-fingered Bitcoiner in question, they paid a whopping 8,042 sats/Byte, or 1,136,000 sats.
That’s more than 1,000 times the typical fee. The average transaction fee for block 760,077 was ~8 sat/vB or $0.22.
Upon further investigation, the same wallet was involved in another Bitcoin transaction 40 minutes earlier that also paid an exorbitant fee. The wallet transferred 4.28 BTC ($83,000) for 564,096 sats or (0.056 BTC or $109). Miners received a rate of 4,022 sats/vB for the placer, adding the block payment to 760,073.
Due to the pseudonym of the Bitcoin blockchain, it is unclear why the user paid such a high transaction fee. It’s also unclear why they repeated the same action four blocks later. As a final suggestion, QnA joked that it could be “a rich Bitcoiner doing it to show off (unlikely)”.
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