A Bitcoin user has made headlines by paying an extraordinary transaction fee of 83.7 Bitcoin (BTC), valued at $3.1 million, for transferring 139.42 BTC. This transaction fee is now the eighth-highest in Bitcoin's 14-year history.
On November 23, the BTC wallet address bc1qn3d…wekrnl attempted to transfer 139.42 BTC to bc1qyf…km36t4 but ended up paying more than half the transaction value in fees. The destination address received only 55.77 BTC, and the mining pool Antpool received the unusually high mining fee on block 818087.
Some users on social media suggested that the sender might have intentionally selected a high transaction fee. However, the replace-by-fee (RBF) node policy, combined with the user's potential unawareness, likely played a role. RBF allows an unconfirmed transaction in the mempool to be replaced with a different transaction that offers a higher fee for faster approval. The mempool acts as a queue for BTC transactions before they are added to the Bitcoin blockchain.
A mempool developer known as mononaut on X (formerly Twitter) mentioned that the user may not have known that RBF orders cannot be canceled, and they might have attempted to replace the fees multiple times, hoping to cancel the transaction. The RBF history indicates that the last replacement increased the fee by another 20%, adding 12.55 BTC in fees.
While this incident shares similarities with a previous case involving Paxos in September, where a $500,000 fee was accidentally sent for a $2,000 BTC transfer, it stands out as the largest Bitcoin transaction fee ever paid in dollar terms. The previous record was held by a 2016 transaction where someone accidentally sent 291 BTC in fees.
Mononaut mentioned that the possibility of Antpool returning the funds would depend on their payout policies, emphasizing the potential implications for their obligations to share transaction fees with miners.
