Topic: Ouch, today someone made a transaction with over $500k fee. (Read 1027 times)

What is or isn't part of "contractual" payout obligations is subject to contract (aka Terms of Service) if there's any. If the pool operator obliged themselves to share fees with participating miners, then they should do it. Whether or not miners' could take legal actions if the pool fails to do that is a different story.
Pool operator having the power to include/exclude fee is irrelevant (they have a financial incentive to do so though). If the fee is earned - it should be shared (unless agreed otherwise).

On an address which it isnt really that too old and making about 60k transaction then i would say that it isnt something a human being on having that kind of on hold and control of such address yet making those transactions which in numbers alone which you could definitely say that it is really that something automated. Majority of comments and words been read up talking about fat finger which it is really that a common issue
but just like been said that having this kind of behavior in regarding transactions then it is really that operated with software and its true that Paxos wont really be tending to make things clear about on how did
this error comes possible or something that happened because it would really be reflecting out their negligence if ever there are really some lapses when it comes to software maintenance or updates which
we know that it is really that very crucial in speaking about its function and really that getting attached with processing transactions which is something that needs to be that maintained and would be checked
out so that there would be no next problems in regarding about this.

It has been quite likely faulty software as was already suggested earlier in this thread. The sending address has 69+k transactions and isn't very old. It doesn't look like some human doing some strange error. It would be nice and maybe a bit entertaining if Paxos would publish what kind of edge case caused this and how their error happened. Unfortunately this won't happen.

Many many thousands of transactions of this address went through without excessive transaction fees. Whatever triggered this fault, clearly there were no sanity checks by software or human controller to detect and avoid ridiculous overpaying fee or other desastrous quirks.

I am still uncertain what to make out of this incident. There are many possibilities as to why this happened. As long as we don't hear from the person who made that transaction we can say anything for sure. A sick joke, a way to send rewards to the miners, a case of hacking, human error, some faulty script, an old transaction getting through now, or is it Satoshi himself sending free money to people? Well, we can say many things about this but we will never know the real reason.

I guess as long as the person who made this transaction comes forward the sender and receiver can't come to a common ground whether to refund it or to keep it to themselves.

entitlement to fee's is not contractual part of miners payout. because its not the miners that decide what transactions and fee's are included in a block. a pool manager can if they want do "empty blocks" or only include transactions with 1sat.. and miners have no say.. all a miner can do is pool hop to a different pool

I 100% agree on this aspect. As I mentioned before, I can't understand how F2Pool could make such gesture without asking participating miners for permission (unless they have it covered in Terms of Service, which I doubt).
So I think refunding it is a moral thing to do in general, but everyone entitled to that fee should make that decision themselves. You can't make good deeds with other peoples money.

you really dont know bitcoin do you

miners dont mine transactions
miners just hash a hash of a block

its the pool operator that manages everything. so yes they as managers decide everything

miners have no control over what transactions go into a block nor what level of fee transactions have.. pools decide all that and pools decide what pay out strategy to offer and what is deemed a valid hash, share the workers present as their work..

its like employment
workers get paid a wage decided by their boss, workers have no control over what the manager decides the product is worth when it presents the end product to a consumer.

at this moment. fees are not treated as a wage. they are treated as a gratuity bonus, the salary is the main blockreward(6.25btc)

It would of course be the right thing to do from the sender's perspective. But is it the right thing to do from the individual miners' perspective? They have honestly mined a valid transaction, and now their pool operator is denying them the profits? Should it really be up to the pool operator at all? Should each individual miner not get to decide what to do with their share of the excess fee which they earned honestly?

I don't think it's as simple as "I paid too much in fees, give it back".

Yeah I am sure some judges in some countries would force a refund. I am also pretty sure if you are USA based there is no precedent on refunding so you would need to be very careful about taxes with a refund.

These are excuses and you know it. You ignored the parts where I mentioned: "If you know that someone paid you too much in error, and it's practical and possible to refund them". No one is talking about anyone demanding a refund, but whether it would be a moral thing to do from the recipient's perspective.
Just because it's judgmental of what the "refundable" amount would be, it doesn't mean it's the right thing to keep any amount sent in error (even if you have a legal right to do so).
Somehow nobody in this thread had any trouble recognising that 20btc was not a normal fee and it was likely sent in error.



Recipient could. If I sent all my bitcoins to your address by some weird accident, I'd like to think you would return them. Not because you have to, but because it's the right thing to do.


Nobody is saying anything about any "expectations" or about introducing any rules that miners must refund such fees.
As for legal recourse - you don't know that. I could easily imagine miner being ordered to return it in some jurisdictions.

Seriously, watch TikTok trial courte, watch every minute of it and you'll understand why I am so confident when I say that.
Or just watch it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0QbtLh976I
Are you still sure that they'll know how bitcoin, bitcoin mining and blockchain network works in depth? They asked such a dumb questions to TikTok CEO, especially when it was truly their wish to ban TikTok and stop its operations.

How much is too much? How are we going to set the limit where after certain satoshis, it's too much? And on individual level, probably $5 more fee is too much for me than half a million dollar for PayPal.

Car's price is fixed price while in bitcoin world, there is no fixed fee to make a transaction, that's why your argument is weak.

That's a different scenario. We will have agreed on a price in advance, so it is clear what you sent was a mistake.

If I pay 100 sats/vbyte in fees, is that clearly a mistake? What about 200? 500? The last block contained two transactions paying over 1,000 sats/vbyte in fees, when 40 sats/vbyte would have been sufficient. Should the miner refund those transactions? Or indeed, should they refund every transaction which paid more than what was necessary? What's stopping me from making all my transactions pay 1,000 sats/vbyte and then demand that the miner return my fee?

If you send all your coins to the wrong address, no one can get them back for you. I don't see why we should expect any different if you pay too much in fees. You might get lucky and the miner in question might be feeling generous, but you definitely shouldn't work on the assumption that they will refund your fee nor that you would have any legal recourse in such a situation.

Would be an ideal world 🌍.  The problem is there are so many crooked people it does not happen enough at least in this case it was fixed.

And my small pool I am in did not need to face the issue.

Depends on your morality (or lack thereof) I guess. To me it's pretty clear. If you know that someone paid you too much in error, and it's practical and possible to refund them - you should.
If you sold a car to your friend and they accidentally wired you $20k instead of $10k, you wouldn't use "other people make mistakes and lose money permanently" as an excuse, you would send it back (I hope).

How are you so sure that there's nil lawyers would have no idea about this kind of case? Is your superiority complex that bad that you think that other people that don't have an inkling of knowledge or their interests are outside of bitcoin don't have the idea what they can do with this? They don't need to know it, the clients and the defendants just need to tell the truth and everything that the court needs to know so they can make a case about it. Clearly you and I aren't a student that's involve with law but I don't just blurt conjecture with confidence. Not everything wrong with bitcoin is money laundering, it's been proven already that bitcoin's a bad cryptocurrency to use for that kind of activity.

They can't demarket BTC if the miners had kept the fee, even if they wanted to do it. BTC's isn't centralized, and anyone with understanding of how it works knows there is no way to enforce a refund or reversal of payment in the BTC's network, unlike in centralized payment systems and centralized crypto. So even if they were going to publish negative info or articles about BTC, it won't change anything, institutions and the media have been doing that for a long time to deceive only the gullible.
Yeah people are naive, but if they believe mining or POW is bad because miners kept the fee you attached to your tx, but paypal is 'good'  'better' when they freeze and confiscate people's funds and could probably seize your money if you make posts that "hurt their feelings" online, then there's nothing you can do to help these kind of people, and maybe BTC wasn't meant for them at all.

I bet 99.9999999% if not 100% of lawyers and judges have absolutely no idea about how bitcoin mining and blockchain network works. This would be the case where they'll have to judge what they don't know and won't be able to understand which argument is right or wrong.
We aren't students of school of law but we can logically say that there is absolutely zero chance that miner is guilty. It's miners duty to mine bitcoin block and keep mining fees. I would even say that if miner agrees to return fees to someone, they are probably part of money laundering. Why? Because, why would someone pay half a billion in fees and then ask miner for return? To launder money, that's how they do that. We can argue on this, right? Sure. But the best judge in this case is Bitcoin Whitepaper, it doesn't say that we should return fees to transaction makers. Instead, miners should keep them, it's their property.

The most interesting part is, what would happen if they didn't return fee? What would PayPal and Paxos do? Would this motivate them to immediately start demarketing of Bitcoin and decentralized Proof Of Work? Probably it was a right choice this time because these big corporations have enormous power, it would make F2Pool and others to look bad and PayPal would try to market itself even better and socially step up because as you know, people are naive and lack critical thinking. Otherwise, I totally agree with you, big corporations should pay! Always!

Who's to say it was the right thing to do? Whenever the average user makes a mistake and over pays their fee, they simply have to wave goodbye to their money. Why should it be different for Paxos?

Average people getting screwed while corporations do what they like is all too reminiscent of fiat.

And impossible to enforce. If the pool operator has already distributed the fee to the miners, then they have nothing to pay back. And if they were to start skimming a percentage off all future blocks to repay it, then their miners would simply switch to a different pool.

They should've asked before declaring they would refund it. And looks like he was just having a laugh with that poll. Despite the majority voting against it, apparently they did the right thing and returned that fee anyway:


That's actually quite interesting from the legal point of view. As much as it's not something that would be reportable to police, depending on the jurisdiction, you could still take the miner to the civil court with a chance of winning.

Like I said that small pool above will send me the fees which in the case of this error would be 7 or 8 coins of the 19 extra paid.

7 to 8 coins is very close to 200k.

 I live in USA I report my mining my taxes due would be over 50k on that 200k close to 60k tax maybe 65k.

The pool above will send it to me automatically it will be in my hands. so I have a tax issue.

Another pool that could have done this is solo ckpool. you hit the block you get it all automatically.

So you would have 24 or 25 coins in hand.


f2pool most likely would freeze it and it would never go into the hands of the miners. so zero tax issues