Cryptocurrency owner paid less than one dollar for transferring 1 billion in bitcoins

One of the reasons for the growing popularity of cryptocurrencies is the low transaction fees, sometimes negligible compared to the amount of the transfer. Cryptocurrency analysts drew attention to an unusual transaction conducted 2 days ago: the user paid less than $ 1 for the transfer of 81,842 BTC.

Given that bitcoin was trading at $ 20,744 at the time of the transaction, the cryptocurrency owner transferred about $ 1.69 billion for $ 0.70. According to experts, in a traditional bank, the amount of commission would be up to 10% of the amount, depending on the country.

Bitcoin itself, as a decentralized network, has no classic transaction fees, but each transfer must be verified and recorded in the block before the funds can be received. Blocks are created and validated by miners who use the computing power of their mining rigs, and, accordingly, in the case of participation in mining pools (a single player will not receive a reward for a block almost 100% of the time), they receive money for their work.

There are also situations when the commission is too high, and there may be several reasons for this. A few days ago, experts noticed an unusual bitcoin transfer: the user paid a fee for sending 3.8 BTC a thousand times higher than it was required. The cryptocurrency owner was supposed to pay only 20 cents for the transfer of $ 63,000 in bitcoin, but it cost him $ 220.

A similar incident, albeit with higher costs, occurred on October 19 on Ethereum. An Ethereum owner paid 125.1 ETH in fees to transfer 57.9 ETH, making a total of 183 ETH (about $ 236,537 at the time of the transfer). The average transaction fee in ethereum is 0.003 ETH ($ 3.88), which is why the user had to pay twice the amount of the desired transfer — it was not established.