First shared on Twitter, the transaction saw 291.241 BTC (about USD 136,000) processed as a part of block 409,008 on the Bitcoin blockchain, with a fee of 291.2409 BTC. The transfer did not go to the intended recipient of the transaction but went to the miner instead.
Mining pool BitClub has been revealed to be the miner of the block which gained the significant fee due to the user error.
Private blockchain consortium R3’s Director of Market Research, Tim Swanson weighed in on the subject, noting that BitClub is not obligated to return the fee. The plausibility of such errors, he reasons, is why terms of conditions and user agreements exist.
Most modern bitcoin wallets and payment processors automatically calculate a viable fee as per the transaction. Quite simply, it would be a hard feat to accidentally send nearly 300 Bitcoin as a fee, which raises the possibility that the sender used an antiquated means for making the transfer.
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