Doh! Bitcoin user loses $3.1m in transaction fees for moving 139 BTC

A Bitcoin user has paid a painful $3.1million in transaction charges for transferring 139 BTC – the eight-highest fee the in the 14-year history of Bitcoin.

The Bitcoin wallet address tried moving 139.42 BTC today, 23 November, just to end up paying more than half the actual value in admin costs.

In the end, the intended address received only 55.77 BTC.

According to the Antpool mining pool, the cringe-inducing mining fee was caught on block 818087.

Some crypto observers have suggested that the error may be due to a node policy called replace-by-fee (RBF), along with a bit of “fat-fingered” amateurish trading on behalf of the sender.

RBF means that an unconfirmed transaction in the mempool is replaced with another transaction – along with a higher fee – to get it moved sooner. The mempool is where all BTC transactions are lined up before confirmation on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Over on X, a mempool developer named mononaut, said the unfortunate crypto trader may have not known that RBF orders can’t be cancelled. Instead, they may have repeatedly replaced the fees in an attempt to cancel it.

According to the RBF history, the last replacement increased the fee by an additional 20%, piling on 12.54824636 BTC in fees.

As a result, it is now is the largest Bitcoin transaction fee ever paid in dollars.

The largest fee in Bitcoin terms was paid in 2016, when someone erroneously transferred 291 BTC in costly fees.

At the time of writing, the price of Bitcoin is trading at $37,205.59 – up 1.92% in the past day, according to CoinMarketCap.