A large cryptocurrency holder paid a record fee of $ 59,204 for a bitcoin transaction

A Bitcoin user BTC $85,310.46 Bitcoin 2.79% Market capitalization $1.69 trillion VOL. 24 hours $1.9 billion accidentally paid a record fee of approximately $ 59,204 (about 0.75 BTC) for transferring a mere $ 2,200. The incident occurred when the user tried to replace an unconfirmed transaction with a new one with a higher priority using the Replace-by-Fee (RBF) feature, which allows for higher fees to speed up processing.

According to the report, a regular transaction with a typical fee was sent first. After that, the user tried to replace it twice through RBF, and in the last attempt, he accidentally added an unused outgoing transaction (UTXO) with a balance of almost 0.75 BTC to cover the additional fee. However, he forgot to update the change output, i.e., he did not specify where the balance should go. As a result, the system counted all these funds as a commission.

For comparison, the average commission on the Bitcoin network at the time of the incident was only $ 1.87, according to the Blockchair analytics platform. That is, the user overpaid more than 30 thousand times the usual level.

Such cases are rare, but they point to the technical complexity of manually managing transactions on the Bitcoin network. This is especially true when using UTXO and manually setting fees in wallet programs, where a user’s mistake can lead to large financial losses.

Earlier it was reported that in February, the average fees in the Ethereum network fell to the level of 2020, and the latest CryptoQuant data links the drop in the ETH to BTC exchange rate to negative on-chain dynamics, in particular after several significant transactions with «wallets woken up».