A Bitcoin (BTC) address overpaid a transaction fee of 83 BTC ($3.13 million) to send 55 BTC on November 23.
This is the highest single Bitcoin fee ever paid to miners, collected by Antpool.
The $3.13 million transaction fee happened in block 818087, which already has 3 confirmations as of writing. According to mempool.space, this fee was overpaid by 120,258 times, which suggests a mistake.
Transaction b5a2af5845a8d3796308ff9840e567b14cf6bb158ff26c999e6f9a1f5448f9aa. Source: mempool.space
Notably, the wallet address “bc1qn…ekrnl” had a previous balance of 139 BTC ($5.24 million) in a single UTXO. This address sent 55 BTC to “bc1qy…m36t4” for the cost of 83 BTC in fees. Moreover, this block collected a total reward of 91.466 BTC in block subsidy (6.25 BTC) and fees (85.216 BTC), which makes the reported mistake responsible for 90% of the total.
Antpool, the currently largest Bitcoin mining pool owned by the ASIC producer BITMAIN, was the lucky miner to collect these fees.
Interestingly, a failed attempt to fork the blockchain at block height 818087 appears to have occurred in the meantime. While writing this report, the block status changed to “Stale” and was supposedly replaced with an exact copy, suggesting it remains valid.
Bitcoin block 818087. Source: mempool.space
F2Pool and the $510,000 worth of Bitcoin fee
In September, a smaller mistake happened in a block mined by the third-largest Bitcoin mining pool, F2Pool. Essentially, the pool identified Paxos as the entity that mistakenly overpaid 19 BTC ($510,000) in fees.
Controversially, F2Pool decided to pay back the fee amount, which raised criticisms in the community, with some prominent figures explaining that this money should have been distributed to the pool’s miners.
Bitcoin transaction fees are a protocol feature created to prioritize transactions in a free fee-bid market. Senders can manually set any desired amount to pay for the miner that will add the sending transaction to a new valid block. Users must be careful to make sure they are not overpaying fees while making a BTC transaction.
