A fortunate Bitcoin miner simply loved one other splash of earnings because of an abnormally excessive charge paid by one of many community’s customers.
Blockchain knowledge reveals that an unknown consumer paid 4 BTC ($172,000) in a transaction charge on Tuesday, dwarfing the quantity really wanted to course of the switch.
A Expensive Blockchain Mistake
In line with mempool.house, the transaction itself solely despatched 2.9 BTC to the supposed recipient, which means the connected charge was over 133% the scale of the transaction itself.
By the location’s metrics, the transaction was overpaid by an element of 29,992x. Particularly, the consumer paid 1,800,890 satoshis per vByte (sat/vB) – a metric for calculating demand for Bitcoin block house at a given time. For that block, the usual transaction solely paid roughly 60 sat/vB.
“While you’re consolidating UTXOs ensure to truly consolidate them as a substitute of turning one right into a charge,” mentioned Tomer Strolight, editor-in-chief for Swan Bitcoin, concerning the transaction in a publish to X.
UTXO stands for Unspent Transaction Output, which means a person BTC switch sitting individually inside a consumer’s Bitcoin pockets. These transfers will be regarded as chunks of bitcoin that the consumer controls: some chunks are bigger than others (comprising extra BTC) and all the chunks put collectively make up the consumer’s pockets stability.
Typically talking, its finest to keep away from dividing one’s BTC into a number of small UTXOs – particularly for financial causes. When sending giant quantities of BTC later, the consumer should pay a charge on each single UTXO that strikes, which means the extra there are, the costlier the transaction will probably be.
On-chain knowledge means that the high-paying consumer was making an attempt to consolidate his UTXOs to keep away from this downside – a way for merging a number of smaller outputs into a bigger one. Days earlier, the identical consumer had acquired two Bitcoin transactions value 2.9 BTC and 4.03 BTC every – the identical values as his Tuesday switch and charge respectively.
Will The Consumer Get His Bitcoin Again?
Although Bitcoin transactions and charges are technically irreversible, overpaid transfers have typically been paid again by the miners who obtain them.
For instance, in September, Bitcoin mining pool F2Pool returned funds to Paxos after the latter by accident paid $500,000 for a Bitcoin transaction.
Months later, mining pool large Antpool reimbursed an nameless consumer’s record-shattering $3.1 million charge to miners.
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