The BTC wallet address bc1qn3d…wekrnl attempted to transfer 139.42 BTC to bc1qyf…km36t4 on November 23rd, only to end up paying more than half of the actual transaction value in fees. The receiving address only received 55.77 BTC. The mining pool Antpool earned an unusually high transaction fee from block 818087.
Social media users speculate that the sender may have chosen a high transaction fee, but the Replace-By-Fee (RBF) policy and sender’s lack of awareness seem to play a role as well. RBF allows the replacement of an unconfirmed transaction in the mempool with another transaction offering a higher fee to get it confirmed sooner. The mempool is where all BTC transactions queue up before being approved and added to the Bitcoin blockchain.
A mempool developer using mononaut on Twitter mentioned that users making transfers might not be aware that RBF orders cannot be canceled. Users may have repeatedly replaced the fees hoping to cancel it. RBF history shows that the final replacement increased the fee by an additional 20%, adding 12.54824636 BTC in fees.
This isn’t the first time Bitcoin users accidentally sent an unreasonably high transaction fee for a Bitcoin transaction. In September, Paxos accidentally sent a $500,000 transaction fee for a $2,000 BTC transfer. In that incident, F2Pool miners verified the transaction and returned the random $500,000 transaction fee to Paxos.
However, this is the largest Bitcoin transaction fee ever paid in USD, surpassing Paxos’ $500,000 transfer mishap in September. The largest fee paid in Bitcoin terms occurred in 2016 when someone accidentally sent a 291 BTC transaction fee.