Bitcoin User Pays 1.6 BTC Fee Worth $102,778. Don’t Make the Same Mistake

A Bitcoin wallet paid 1.60 BTC in network fees, worth roughly $102,778, and delivered exactly zero coins to anyone. The transaction was confirmed on August 12 inside block 962,142.

Chain records show a single input of 160,343,885 satoshis. Miners took every one of those satoshis, while the lone output carried no value at all.

How the Bitcoin Fee Spiraled Out of Control

The sender ran an automated script that leaned on Replace-by-Fee, or RBF. That feature lets a user resubmit an unconfirmed Bitcoin transaction with a higher fee to jump the mempool queue.

RBF exists for good reason. Fee estimates go stale within minutes, and a stuck payment can sit in the queue for hours.

However, the loop broke. Rather than stopping at a sensible ceiling, the bot raised its bid once per second. Each new version chewed deeper into the wallet balance.

Eventually the Bitcoin fee swallowed the whole input. The final version left nothing for the recipient, so the payment landed at zero. Bitcoin nodes accepted it anyway, because the protocol never caps what a sender may hand miners.

… Continue reading the full article at the original source below.