3 ms·

Can someone please explain to me how this is possible and what is the miner supposed to do if they don't have all those Ethers?

rictic 5y ago
The miner received those ETH, nominally in exchange for their services validating transactions. Previous situations like this have been the result of the transaction author (or their software) making a mistake.
kingo55 5y ago
They probably mixed up their spent output with the fee output. It happens from time to time and some miners are happy to send the funds back. But it'll be interesting to see what happens in this case when it's $23m.
- csomar 5y ago
  That’s the case for Bitcoin but ETH doesn’t have inputs/outputs.
0x000000001 5y ago
Someone submitted a transaction with incorrect parameters allowing this to happen and the miner got a $23m tip as a result
- threevox 5y ago
  Seems more like fraud/money laundering, from what I can tell
  - pandemicsyn 5y ago
    Ignoring the already public statements that have already been made by the Bitfinex and co, and the fact that a large transactions like this is guaranteed to trigger folks in the community to poke at the transaction, I'm curious what leads you to believe that its a money laundering attempt?
collectedparts 5y ago
Think of ETH fees as more or less an auction. When you submit a transaction to the Ethereum network, you're hoping it will be mined as soon as possible. Miners select which transactions to include based on the miner fee. The minimum miner fee that is required for a transaction to be processed promptly is therefore constantly an open question / constantly changing, which gives rise to services like https://ethgasstation.info/ https://ethgasstation.info/ which attempt to tell you how much you should reasonably expect to pay. In terms of how today's outcome is possible: when you are submitting a transaction, any amount of ETH that you have on your account could validly be spent as the fee. So in this case, either by human error or a software bug, someone with a large amount of ETH in their balance essentially spent all of it on the transaction fee. The miner _gets_ all of those ETH. So some lucky miner just got a huge spike in profit.

rictic 5y ago

The miner received those ETH, nominally in exchange for their services validating transactions. Previous situations like this have been the result of the transaction author (or their software) making a mistake.

kingo55 5y ago

They probably mixed up their spent output with the fee output. It happens from time to time and some miners are happy to send the funds back. But it'll be interesting to see what happens in this case when it's $23m.

csomar 5y ago
That’s the case for Bitcoin but ETH doesn’t have inputs/outputs.

0x000000001 5y ago

Someone submitted a transaction with incorrect parameters allowing this to happen and the miner got a $23m tip as a result

threevox 5y ago
Seems more like fraud/money laundering, from what I can tell
- pandemicsyn 5y ago
  Ignoring the already public statements that have already been made by the Bitfinex and co, and the fact that a large transactions like this is guaranteed to trigger folks in the community to poke at the transaction, I'm curious what leads you to believe that its a money laundering attempt?

collectedparts 5y ago

Think of ETH fees as more or less an auction. When you submit a transaction to the Ethereum network, you're hoping it will be mined as soon as possible. Miners select which transactions to include based on the miner fee. The minimum miner fee that is required for a transaction to be processed promptly is therefore constantly an open question / constantly changing, which gives rise to services like https://ethgasstation.info/ https://ethgasstation.info/ which attempt to tell you how much you should reasonably expect to pay. In terms of how today's outcome is possible: when you are submitting a transaction, any amount of ETH that you have on your account could validly be spent as the fee. So in this case, either by human error or a software bug, someone with a large amount of ETH in their balance essentially spent all of it on the transaction fee. The miner _gets_ all of those ETH. So some lucky miner just got a huge spike in profit.