Topic: Someone just paid 83BTC for transaction fee, (Read 632 times)

New information:


So apparently, the 83.5 BTC transaction fee was a programming error (albeit a part of a malware that swept the person's wallet, so I don't think anyone will necessarily feel bad for the hacker).

It makes me wonder how can people screw up their code this badly to spend a large amount of bitcoin on fees, though.

The alleged victim, @83_5BTC, revealed that after transferring 139 BTC to a new cold wallet, the funds were immediately swept to another wallet by the attackers. The transaction split the sum, sending 55.77 BTC to the hackers’ wallet, while the rest, a staggering 83.65 BTC, was paid as a transaction fee. This incident surpasses the previous high-fee record of 19.8 BTC.

Mononaut, the anonymous operator behind the mempool.space bitcoin explorer, weighed in on the incident. He suggested that “the most likely explanation is that the wallet was generated from bad entropy.” In layman’s terms, this means the wallet’s security was compromised due to weak randomization in its creation process. Mononaut’s insight provides a crucial understanding of the technical flaw that may have led to this unfortunate event. source

I probably won't ever understand why there are people who fiddle around with such huge amounts of BTCBTCBTC and likely have infected systems or use some very unsafe or even completely malicious tools to create what they think is a cold wallet.

You're right. I've experienced this first hand and it still hurts me till date. Mine was $20 at a time when I felt I had set it at something around $2. I can't be too sure if it was the app that reverted it to that high or me who didn't crosscheck properly. Yes, I used a closed wallet and there wasn't an option of RBF. So, I couldn't do anything once I noticed my error immediately I had triggered the transaction. It's crazy how we get to find out our mistake once we press the trigger. I just had to quietly rue my loss. Anyway, I hope the over 80btc transaction fee was also done in error and hopefully the antpool that processed it will be able to return the excess to the originating wallet.

What the hell. Stop buying taint.

~

Someone claimed that the wallet which the transaction in question was made from had been hacked.


https://twitter.com/83_5BTC/status/1727996658758058120


And here is the message signed from the same address posted by the same twitter account.


https://twitter.com/83_5BTC/status/1728873072349069352

But from an AML/CFT perspective, you are basically turning "dirty" money into a seemingly legitimate and clean financial transaction (revenue generated from a business activity).

I heard a few cases like this which is a very costly mistake, I didn't know if this is a newbie or not.
AFAIK, wallets that don't support RBF are those custodial wallets and I found out that the transaction mistakenly put a huge fee doesn't support RBF.

-snip-

The transaction was first broadcasted with a fee of 70 bitcoins and then later was replaced with that of 83 bitcoin as fees.

-snip-

Someone claimed that the wallet which the transaction in question was made from had been hacked.
~

...And here is the message signed from the same address posted by the same twitter account. ..

Why does that matter? Whether you intentionally or "accidentally" sent a transaction, it is very much considered a payment from a taxman perspective.

As we all know the transaction fee continues to get high as the mempool remains congested for almost a month now due to reoccurring ORDI tokens on the bitcoin blockchain. This has left some people a bit furious and some newbies making costly mistakes of setting high transaction fees.

A transaction that was in block 818087 had actually paid a whopping sum of 83 bitcoins as the transaction fee. I would say this is a costly mistake but for someone having that huge amount of bitcoin in their possession I don’t get it. The transaction was first broadcasted with a fee of 70 bitcoins and then later was replaced with that of 83 bitcoin as fees.

My guess is the sender was probably trying to set is fee as 70 and 83Sats/vbyte and then mistakenly set out that high fee. The block was mined by Antpool, hopefully they would treat it as mistake and return the funds.

1. TXID for the 83 bitcoin fee: b5a2af5845a8d3796308ff9840e567b14cf6bb158ff26c999e6f9a1f5448f9aa

2. The replaced transaction ID: 0c35f3c8a0c38f45629940ee9ab2b1c93d408be113845a735043261ad20f3351

Advice to newbies check properly the amount your setting as fee and make sure you are looking at the right fees estimator, use wallets that allows bumping of fees in case you set a very low one

As we all know the transaction fee continues to get high as the mempool remains congested for almost a month now due to reoccurring ORDI tokens on the bitcoin blockchain. This has left some people a bit furious and some newbies making costly mistakes of setting high transaction fees.

A transaction that was in block 818087 had actually paid a whopping sum of 83 bitcoins as the transaction fee. I would say this is a costly mistake but for someone having that huge amount of bitcoin in their possession I don’t get it. The transaction was first broadcasted with a fee of 70 bitcoins and then later was replaced with that of 83 bitcoin as fees.

My guess is the sender was probably trying to set is fee as 70 and 83Sats/vbyte and then mistakenly set out that high fee. The block was mined by Antpool, hopefully they would treat it as mistake and return the funds.

Advice to newbies check properly the amount your setting as fee and make sure you are looking at the right fees estimator, use wallets that allows bumping of fees in case you set a very low one

Not the same. Since it was a transaction fee, it is difficult to prove whether there was intent or an accidental error.

What was the chance that ANTpool would be the one to mine the block? Isn't it possible that someone else would mine the block and thus, they would lose this huge sum of money?

It could be money laundering

It could be money laundering, though I doubt that because on-chain transactions are all public. There are no names attached to Bitcoin addresses, but you can always follow the flow of coins.

If this was deliberate then this obfuscates the history of the coins that turned into transaction fee. Doesn't really sound reasonable to me, too.

To me this looks more like a mistake of someone acting in a rush for whatever reasons because the transaction lacks a change output. And if you either don't understand that transaction inputs are always consumed completely and you don't want to send all of your inputs (minus a reasonable transaction fee) to your output(s), then you always need a change output that returns the excess of your inputs back into your wallet.

This transaction was also the final one of a small chain of CPFP transactions where the two ancestors had a bit too low transaction fee rate (64 and 119 sat/vB where the lowest fee rate of transactions in block 818087 appears to be 129 sat/vB; previous block 818086 had a fee span starting at 112 sat/vB, so 64 sat/vB is clearly way too low to start with if you want a timely confirmation). Someone got nervous or lost his mind while block 818087 took roughly 30 minutes to be mined.

Following transactions of the 55.76998378BTC combine some small amounts and peel of a bunch of 6BTC outputs which are further involved in some transactions, all with mostly optimal transaction fees.