A Bitcoin miner profited handsomely due to an abnormally high transaction fee paid by an anonymous network user. On-chain data revealed that on January 16, a wallet address paid a transaction fee equivalent to 172,000 USD, or 4 BTC, which was significantly higher than the necessary fee for the transfer.
The transaction in question, noted by Mempool.space, involved the payment of a fee for 4 BTC while only 2.9 BTC was sent to the recipient. This resulted in the user paying a transaction fee over 133% of the BTC amount sent.
Analysis shows the user paid 29,992 times more than the required transaction fee at the time, with a rate of 1,800,890 Satoshi per vByte (sat/vB), a metric used to calculate Bitcoin block space demand. The standard fee for the block was around 60 sat/vB.
Tomer Strolight of Swan Bitcoin commented on the incident, highlighting the importance of ensuring UTXOs are correctly consolidated rather than mistakenly converted into fees. UTXOs, or Unspent Transaction Outputs, represent individual BTC transfers within a user’s wallet, with varying sizes contributing to the wallet’s balance.
Generally, it is best to avoid splitting BTC into numerous small UTXOs for economic reasons, as each UTXO incurs a fee when moved. On-chain data suggests the user was attempting to consolidate UTXOs to avoid this issue. However, the same user had previously made two transactions consisting of 2.9 BTC and 4.03 BTC days earlier.
While Bitcoin network transactions and fees are technically irreversible, miners often refund excessive fees. For instance, F2Pool refunded 500,000 USD to Paxos for an overpaid fee, and Antpool returned 3.1 million USD to a user for a record-breaking fee payment.