by Bitcoin can be rock-hard. It is a completely neutral and transparent protocol, making you fully responsible for your own affairs. This also applies if you make a mistake, like an unknown Bitcoiner happened to you two days ago. He sent several tens of thousands of dollars in transaction fees for a small payment.
Bitcoin transaction
The blockexplorer shows that a user sent a total of 0.01088549 BTC worth $194 to an unknown wallet. However, something went wrong: he paid 2.66 BTC in transaction costs, which amounts to $47,000.
There are various bots that report large, labelled or special transactions on Twitter, for example. And these definitely belong in the list. It was the automated tool called Bitcoin Block Bot that noticed this transaction.
The cost of a Bitcoin payment is flexible. If you add higher fees to a payment, it is more likely that the payment will be fished out of the mem pool faster by the miners.
So you can set the number of fees you give by entering the number of sats per bytes. For slow payments, choose 1 satoshi per byte, and if you want the payment to go directly into the blockchain, look in the mempool to see what is needed.
In the past month, this ratio has never really exceeded 250 sats/byte. But don’t worry: the above transaction had 2381,445 sats/byte, which brings the total of the fees to $47,000.
Because the protocol is neutral and does not distinguish between entities, this cannot be reversed just like that. The only solution could be to get in touch with the block’s miner, and hope that he will return some of the money. However, this is very unlikely.
Transaction costs
BitInfoCharts reports that the current average transaction cost is only 0,00027 BTC, worth $4.82. This is already 63% lower than the October figure, when costs soared to an average of $13.15.
Earlier this month, two whales sent almost half a billion dollars in BTC, and paid only $46 for it.
Do you have any questions about transaction costs or would you like to have a chat about the news? Then drop by in our Telegram chat!
