Topic: Bitcoin Whale transfers $1 billion in bitcoin and pays $3.54 in fees? (Read 319 times)

When you hold such incredible amounts you can use a tx accelerator for sure or talk to a friend at a mining pool to include the tx in the batch.
Anyway this transaction should bring some publicity to Bitcoin. Paying a coffee worth to transfer 1 billion dollar worth is cool.

Can't be sure about the information of the coin and who actually own these coins. But, since we had paypal thingy a few days ago, this can be related to paypal itself. Definitely, not the normal users. The other theory can be the old story about these huge transactions where exchanges transfer their bitcoins, so maybe these bitcoins belong to some exchange. But the more interesting part of the story is the transaction fee, as you said. That's the magic of bitcoin, you can easily send over one billion dollars and pay less than four dollars for the transaction fee, which is incredible.

PS: I see another topic explaining about this transaction and should be archived, maybe: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/--5285450

There is no vulnerability.
As I said before the transaction happened well before the spike in fees, they just paid the average at that time, but people don't read anymore..


Yes, it is possible, yeah it would make a little sense for an exchange that owns a huge chunk of a mining farm to make sure that their huge consolidation transaction gets top priority and the competition is forced to pay more. But, digging deeper, why would a miner accept a lower fee? If they accept lower fees for certain transactions it must be because they are paid extra over the counter, and then we're at a point where you're paying a miner more to prioritize your low transaction fee when you could simply increase the fee and not have to go through deals and other stuff, not even mentioning you won't have to wait for that certain miner to mine a block.

Besides, we're talking about millions and 10$ in fees, common..

If then what you are saying true , there is a vulnerability i guess in the transaction mechanism
I mean for those people who looking to avoid high fee while they will have to move the bitcoin pretty often , they could make a deal with certain mining farm / miners to make it have a low fee periodically.
You think it is possible and makes sense guys?
Is there any other way doing this fee adjustment in legit way and risk-free? I mean a low fee sometimes makes your transaction pending for hours even days.

That is the benefit of bitcoin among the many people who are complaining about their transaction fees. It doesn't depend on how much bitcoin we are transferring but with the current market condition whether if it is congested or good to transfer. The good thing about bitcoin is that you don't need to calculate the percentage of the amount you want to transfer to consider the transaction fees. Though, it limits the microtransactions to bitcoin that is why many are still preferring to use altcoins. Pretty soon, cryptocurrency enthusiasts and those who support bitcoin at a technical level could develop a solution to this problem of lowering transaction fees.

I agree with the above. There is no way the whale was able to bypass the transaction network fee without having some sort of alliance with the mining community.

This either being something he controls like the idea above where the guy has his own mining infrastructure or indeed knowing somebody who does mining and somehow transferred to their node.

I am ware some of this may come across as sounding ridiculous but there is no way in heaven this was done legitimately, without the advantage/s described above.

One day a transaction fee will cost not less than $10

The fee for every transaction is allocated in terms of the block size, but for some reason a small transaction and a large volume transaction getting accumulated in similar block size. Somehow bitcoin too is favouring the people with large volume of funds. Anyhow it hasn't turned to be a rich man's asset till now.

Because the whale wasn't idiot to let a wallet pick a tx fee. If I was the whale, i would do exactly the same: Set it to 1 sat/B broadcast and leave it alone... Especially if this was destined to a cold wallet, one day or three won't make any difference.

We are not "subject" to anything. You are letting a wallet decide for you. This is your mistake as an user, its not even Bitcoin's fault, but whoever designed the wallet to default to this abominable guessing fee thing which isn't part of Bitcoin in the first place.

"High fees" is an artifact myth of whoever decided users were "too dumb" to choose a fee for themselves. I do blame wallet developers for defaulting to this.

You can right now use a low 3 sat/B fee for a 1 day confirmation. Is your wallet even telling you this? Of course next block costs 280, and one hour 266, and the other wallets are also calculating the same and adding more and more, its like a horde of bots self feeding themselves, it only took a little price fluctuation to initiate the cascade; and i bet those exchange/online wallets that you can't even change the tx fee at all aren't exactly helping... Sure, lets remove the "confusing" (sane) manual setting of a fee, the "user" only wants things by the next block, or one hour (6 blocks) at most. Lets call it "Priority", because you know, confusing numbers, math is hard... What could possibly go wrong?

People thinking Bitcoin is "subjecting people to high fees". Never ending talk about "high fees", because the wallets are racing each other to confirm first by user choice...

that's simply because in bitcoin when we send a transaction we pay for the space in blocks not for the transfer of amount of money. that is one of many things that sets bitcoin apart from banks.

i wouldn't call them a "whale" either. the more appropriate word is to call them "custodian" since it clearly belongs to a service and it is their users' funds not their own.

The fee is really low for such a huge transfer. I wonder how long it took for the transaction to confirm. In my opinion, more should have been charged as fee for such an amount if the network is really congested and if this was for fast transfer. .

It does not depend to the number of bitcoin or total cost of bitcoin you have transferred. It just show the irrelevance of the size of transaction and the rate. You can transfer fastly when the network is not that much congested. So to avoid difficulty in transacting or paying a lot of fees, better to look in the mempool.

• Timezones make differences because there are geographical locations from which more bitcoin transactions will made. More transaction counts do cause higher transaction fee.
• Days of week make difference too. Weekends usually give you better fee rate (cheaper). Do you know that in last weekend, there are few times mempool was dipped to 1 satoshi/(v)byte before all things go up?
• Another reason is average and median are different statistics. Average can be seriously affected by outliers (red circles in the box plot) but median can not. You can call median as true average statistics of a sample.

More details is here Bitcoin transaction fees (feer per KB - in USD) with median, outliers, plots

There were people who spent $153 per kb for his/ her transaction. Crazy sender!

About weekend and institutional effects (I gonna give you updates and improve that thread later).

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Transaction fee is decided by transaction size and fee rate.

• Fee rate: Senders can set any fee rate they want -- of course, must avoid 0 satoshi/(v)byte.
• Transaction size: is decided by input and output (types and numbers).

If you make 2 transactions with same type and same fee rate, just different in the amount of bitcoin (and value in USD), 2 transactions will have same transaction fee.  

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Reminders

• Consolidate your small inputs (I learned it from LoyceV). If you do it on last weekend, today you can make transaction with cheaper fees (even you have to make 2 transactions, 1 on last weekend and 1 today)
• Observe mempool and plan your transactions (days of week and hourframe)
• Sign your transaction with opt-in Replace-by-Fee option (just in case) when fee rate is low
• Be your own bank with non-custodial wallet. If you use custodial wallet or store your bitcoin on exchanges, casinos you have accept funny situations

The tx date according to blockchain is 2020-10-26 17:06
Looking at the mempool it happened somewhere here:


so before the rise in fees, or at least at the start of it.

LE:
Ignore that drop in the graph, it's a glitch, the moment of the tx is where the red do is.

I think moving 1 billion USD only for 3 bucks is pretty cheap. It is not really cheap when you want to pay 3 fiddies to the miners to move 20 bucks however. That's why altcoins are still a thing.

And probably the whales are not in a hurry and is willing to pay the 'average' fee as compare to us, who wanted to get our transaction get confirmed in the next block because we wanted to see it go through our wallet in matter of minutes or hours and not days.

The hope word 'Later' has been in used since I could remember, that's when the high fees became a trending discussion in the late 2017. The recommendations of using the SegWit address became a norm that It'll help in lesser transaction fees but it seems from recent experience that's not the incase. If Bitcoin strongly has the   intentions of conquering the furnace industry in regards to been the recommended payment option due to its unique quality then the miners have to become less greedy.

Here we're praising this low fee on such high amount of value been transferred yet the majority are getting drowned in outrageous charges. Don't forget the network patronage would be coming more from those in middle or low class which won't have such high value in their wallet.

I spent over $10 in fees for a value barely worth $19 in bitcoin (you can read on it here). The issue of high fees are far from getting over but we hope further since that has been the only options so far.

Yes, there are many ways to be able to speed up the transactions we do, mainly by increasing the transaction fees received, of course this can also speed up our transactions.

Because as we know every day more and more bitcoin users will certainly take longer time to make transactions.

It's normal and entirely dependent on the time of the day when the transaction was sent. Seeing the average fees during that time, it's not even far off really, and also if someone has that amount on their wallets, they could easily ask miners to include that transaction within their blocks in order to get confirmed easily. It's not really far from happening and in fact, it's actually one of bitcoin's intended role. It may not be perpetually true for bitcoin but for the most part, you can send virtually any amount without having to pay for a hefty fee.

This is should be the case or the list of theories might go on and on. The only way to successfully manage to send that amount with low fees is to pay some mining companies for their service and your theories might be the closest one to prove it. Anyway sending a huge amount of money in a single transaction was amazing and I wonder where those BTC came from. If it is from a known Exchange then that would be much easier to explain then.