Bitcoiner Pays $3.1 Million in Biggest Transaction Fee Ever

An unidentified Bitcoin (BTC) user paid a transaction fee of 83.6 BTC ($3,136,058) when he moved the coins on Thursday, the largest transaction fee the network has ever recorded in dollars.

The total amount of the transaction was 139 BTC (5,198,720.84), which means that less than half of the transfer (55.7 BTC) actually reached the recipient.

Another costly marketing mistake

The precious transaction was sent from the wallet address bc1qn3d…wekrnl to the address bc1qyf…km36t4 on November 23, at Bitcoin block 818087.

According to mempool.space, the payout is 119,980x based on the price of block 141/sat/vb at the time.

On Bitcoin, users can voluntarily attach a payment to their transactions so that the network can process them faster.

In particular, the Bitcoin miner responsible for building the network's next block will have a greater incentive to include the transaction in the block's repository, as he will receive the associated fee as a reward.

Bitcoin Senders includes a feature called “replace with fee” (RBF), whereby an unconfirmed Bitcoin transaction can be replaced with another for a higher fee if the first one is insufficient.

According to mempool developer @mononautical on X, the sender may not know that RBF orders cannot be canceled, and has repeatedly tried to cancel the transaction by making high payments.

The RBF history of the transaction shows that the last replacement attempt added another 20% to his transaction fee, adding 12.54 BTC in unnecessary costs.

What happens to the money?

Although the sender and receiver are still unknown, the winner of the block payment was Antpool – one of the largest Bitcoin mining pools in Asia.

Antpool was responsible for 29.4% of Bitcoin's total hash rate over the past 3 days and typically averaged transaction fees of 1.6 BTC per block, according to the Hashrate Index.

Under normal circumstances, mining pool operators divide profits from rewards and fees between themselves and miners as per their specific contractual arrangements.

However, a similar case involving a large contingent fee sent by Paxos in September was gracefully withdrawn by F2Pool.

“I suspect that Antpool will pay it back after it is connected to the transaction,” Blockstream CEO and Bitcoin developer Adam Tegel wrote to X on Tuesday.