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Accidentally pay an 80BTC transaction fee? Please contact us for a refund
- aphextron 9y agoNo explanation? How is it even possible for something like this to happen?
- krallja 9y agoLike a check, you can write whatever value you want in the "Amount" box.
- mhluongo 9y agoMost wallets estimate fees based on transaction size, so this did require a particular wallet or using an "advanced setting"
- mikeash 9y agoOr a bug. In any case, since this post is from the recipient of the fee, they probably have no way of knowing how it happened. At least, not until and unless the person who paid it comes forward.
- mhluongo 9y agoSomeone set a custom fee or built a transaction manually and made a mistake. Alternatively, someone just learned an expensive programming lesson.
- cjbprime 9y agoSome exchanges/apps have poor UX that makes the purpose of text fields unclear and allows you to get them confused with each other.
- zargon 9y agoYou ask for an explanation as if it's btc.com's mistake. It's not. They merely mined the block that had the fee. They have no way of knowing why the entity that signed that transaction gave it the fee that they did.
- FabHK 9y agoIn a transaction, you specify the inputs (addresses, sources of BTC, and they're completely used up), and the output (destination addresses) and how much each destination gets. A typical transaction might look like this: 1) Inputs: my wallet (1 BTC, and this is all taken) 2) Outputs: 2a) pay something to merchant A (0.1 BTC), 2b) pay most of the rest back to my wallet (0.89 BTC) 3) Remainder: The rest (1 - 0.1 - 0.89 = 0.01 BTC) goes to the miner as the transaction fee. The sum of outputs ((2, what you spend) must be less than or equal to the sum of inputs ((1), what you got) - that's checked by the miners. Any remainder (3), however, is taken to be a mining fee and goes to the miner. So, could be what happened here is that someone forgot to add (2b), paying the "change" back into their own wallet. By default, then, it becomes (3): transaction fee. This doesn't happen with well written wallet software, of course, but if you manually create transactions, who knows.
- woah 9y agoThe correct fee should have been 2BTC?
- jldugger 9y agoI think it's supposed to be approx 10-20 satoshis at the moment.
- mod 9y agoAccording to the article, 2btc
- mhluongo 9y agoActually, they're based on tx size. Fees are estimates as satoshis/byte. 10-20 satoshis is incredibly cheap
- jldugger 9y agoAh right. Thanks for jogging my memory; been a while since I last researched this for an online debate about bitcoin ^_^ Looks like the top of the txn queue is 330 satoshis per byte, so for an average size txn of 226 bytes, you're paying 75k satoshis, or about 2 bucks! (according to bitcoinfees.21.co)
- unknownsavage 9y agoThey're basing on that if someone was sending a stupidly aggressive fee (400 satoshis per byte). Anything above that is just obviously an error. You can get an idea of what fees should be with estimatefee.com
- mootothemax 9y agothe correct fee should have been approximately 2BTC. At current rates isn't that a $5,000ish transaction fee? Have I misunderstood something? That seems like a crazy amount, especially given the hype surrounding Bitcoin.
- TylerE 9y agoBe your own bank they said, it'll be awesome!
- matt_wulfeck 9y agoDon't you know Bitcoin is a system with really low fees and fast transactions??
- ryan_j_naughton 9y agothis must be sarcasm, right?
- andrepd 9y agoFees are around 80c and average confirmation time is ~150 minutes. Pretty good for the first implementation of a completely new technology which has scaled 100,000x in 6 years. I don't really get the cheap shots but ok.
- abrkn 9y agoThis happens when someone manually crafts a transaction. In Bitcoin, if you have an input of 100 BTC and make a transaction with a single output of 20 BTC, the remaining 80 BTC are kept by the miner. There's no wallet software that would let you do this. It's like paying a $20 check with a $100 bill and saying "keep the change."
- jstanley 9y agoMore like paying a $20 bill with a $100 note and not saying "don't keep the change"!
- wmf 9y agoThere is a way to mostly prevent these errors BTW: Change the transaction format so that the sum of input values must equal the sum of output values (edit: including a special fee output which should only be ~8 bytes); this would prevent money from being "lost" as fees. If someone is planning to change the transaction format anyway (ahem) maybe they could also add this safety feature.
- zwily 9y agoThat would eliminate fees entirely as well, unless you're proposing an additional "fee" output. That would take additional space, which means it won't flow as space is at a premium. I don't know of any wallet software that would let someone do this, so this must have been a manually-created transaction.
- wmf 9y agoIf only there was some way to increase the space available for transactions! But your overall point is well taken: Bitcoin is sociopathic software where "sorry for your loss" is considered a feature, not a bug. Nonstandard hand-rolled transaction? Fuck you, you deserve to get robbed.
- pas 9y agoThere's always more space in the mempool :) And IBLT can amortize block latency very effectively https://bitcoincore.org/en/2015/12/23/capacity-increases-faq/ https://bitcoincore.org/en/2015/12/23/capacity-increases-faq...
- zwily 9y ago> If only there was some way to increase the space available for transactions! Hehe. > But your overall point is well taken: Bitcoin is sociopathic software where "sorry for your loss" is considered a feature, not a bug. Nonstandard hand-rolled transaction? Fuck you, you deserve to get robbed. Well except, in this case, the miner is offering to give the fee back. In general, you're right though. :)
- 9y ago
- samstave 9y agoITT it is revealed I know literally nothing of how BTC operates. What is the best way to remove my ignorance?
- beardog 9y agoOriginal Bitcoin whitepaper: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf Semi-official Bitcoin wiki: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Main_Page https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Main_Page
- avaer 9y agoThe best? Write your own blockchain; speaking from experience. The easiest? Read https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/ https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/.
- sharemywin 9y agoalas, still google...
- wmf 9y agohttp://www.righto.com/2014/02/bitcoins-hard-way-using-raw-bitcoin.html http://www.righto.com/2014/02/bitcoins-hard-way-using-raw-bi...
- ftk 9y agoCheck out this awesome video by 3Blue1Brown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4
- SilasX 9y agoRelated true story: I wrote a free e-book about Bitcoin[1], and Bitcoin dev lead Gavin Andresen wanted to send a donation as thanks. He apparently meant to send $10, but sent 10 BTC by accident. (worth $3,000 at the time, now worth $25,000) He emailed me and my co author asking (very politely!) for us to send it back, which we did (minus some amount to make it come out to the intended donation). You can see the transactions here: https://blockchain.info/address/19QsxWwNyeQ9NceaXZFXkHSHbdKCibjYKR https://blockchain.info/address/19QsxWwNyeQ9NceaXZFXkHSHbdKC... (And verify that address matches up with the donation address on the site). [1] http://understandingbitcoin.us http://understandingbitcoin.us
- mtgx 9y agoThese sort of UX issues will have to be resolved before cryptocurrencies become "mainstream". It wouldn't be seen as acceptable by mom and pop to "accidentally" send thousands of dollars to a store for a pack of cigarettes. However, I do think we'll start to see some fixes for this in a few years, hopefully without increased centralization (like the DNS system).
- DanBC 9y ago"Fat Finger" errors are reasonably common. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat-finger_error https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat-finger_error
- colordrops 9y agoIt happens with cash too though. Sometimes you hand over a 20 when you meant to hand over a 1. To be fair though US cash does have some UX issues, with the same size and similar coloring.
- kpil 9y agoAnd securities. Quite often people sends orders with the number of shares accidentally set to the intended nominal value.
- matthewbauer 9y ago
- dk8996 9y agoIf only there was a technology that can provide low fees and fast tx. *sarcasm
- sswaner 9y agoIs it possible that this is a scheme designed to draw a specific miner out of his/her anonymity?
- krallja 9y agoThe bitcoin ledger is public, so the miner fee information for this transaction should be verifiable in private before the spender decides to deanonymize themselves.
- snakeanus 9y agoHow can they help exactly? Who gets these fees?
- krallja 9y agoBTC.com got the fee, because they mined the block.
- notheguyouthink 9y agoWhat's a likely solution here? I'm perplexed on how they can do anything to help this transaction fee, without just giving money away. Thoughts?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- matthew-wegner 9y agoThey said they were the ones who mined the block, so they have all the transaction fees in that block (in addition the new Bitcoin created)...
- notheguyouthink 9y agoAh hah, this makes much more sense. Thank you. I thought the money evaporated.
- 55555 9y agoThey are giving the money away. Roughly $195,000 USD.
- matthewbauer 9y agoIs that really worth the good PR for them? It seems almost ridiculous if it was not BTC.com's mistake to begin with.
- oh_sigh 9y agoThey mined the block, so they got to keep the btc. They're going to send it back to the person once they verify their identity. Hopefully that person does t destroy their keys when they're done.