According to Cointelegraph: A Bitcoin user has inadvertently paid a transaction fee worth $3.1 million (83.7 Bitcoin) for transferring 139.42 BTC, marking the eighth largest transaction fee in Bitcoin's 14-year span. This incident occurred on November 23, when a transaction from the Bitcoin wallet address bc1qn3d…wekrnl tried transferring 139.42 BTC to bc1qyf…km36t4. However, the recipient only received 55.77 BTC, with more than half the transferred amount being paid as the transaction fee.
The mining pool Antpool picked up this unusually large mining fee in block 818087. Some social media users speculated that the sender might have unwittingly selected such a high transaction fee due to the replace-by-fee (RBF) node policy and a lack of awareness about it.
RBF permits replacing an unconfirmed transaction waiting in the mempool with a different transaction offering a higher fee to secure earlier clearance. The mempool serves as the holding area for all pending Bitcoin transactions before they are verified and added to the Bitcoin blockchain.
A mempool developer, known as mononaut on the platform X (previously Twitter), suggested the sender might have been unaware that RBF orders cannot be cancelled and might have continually adjusted the fees in an attempt to retract the operation.
This instance isn't the first occurrence of an accidental exorbitant transaction fee. Paxos, a Bitcoin exchange platform, mistakenly sent a $500,000 fee for a $2,000 BTC transfer back in September. However, the miner from F2Pool who validated the transaction returned the substantial accidental fee.
Given its dollar value, this incident outranks Paxos' unfortunate experience and is currently the largest Bitcoin transaction fee paid in USD. The largest fee paid in Bitcoin was an unintended 291 BTC fee sent in 2016 for a single Bitcoin transaction.
Operations like Antpool's response to such issues can depend on their payout policies, as stated by mononaut. Antpool has not yet commented on the issue or responded to requests for remarks.
