In brief
- Someone paid over $100,000 in order to send just $10 on the Bitcoin network.
- Bitcoin transaction fees are typically a fraction of the amount sent.
- Experts told Decrypt that it was a strange error to make.
A Bitcoin user paid more than $105,197—slightly less than one BTC at the time—to send just $10 of the digital coin on Tuesday, according to blockchain data.
First flagged on Crypto Twitter—or X—by the digital asset community, the user paid the huge amount to send just 0.00010036 BTC, data from Mempool shows.
“It was definitely some non-standard way of crafting a transaction,” Nick Hansen, CEO and co-founder of the Luxor mining pool, noted dryly to Decrypt.
Bitcoin transaction fees are generally only a fraction of the amount sent, although they may vary when traffic spikes on the blockchain. Fees have been low recently after mining pools slashed them in July to increase blockchain activity.
The average BTC transaction currently stands at $0.91 cents, according to data provider BitInfoCharts. On Tuesday, Decrypt was able to pay less than $0.30 cents to miners to send $10 worth of Bitcoin.
Users can adjust transaction fees on their crypto wallet appropriately to get processed faster, and many wallets usually warn users that they are overpaying to get a transaction processed.
In order to send money on the Bitcoin network, users pay miners fees for verifying transactions. Miners then receive newly minted tokens for their efforts.
The largest cryptocurrency by market value is being used increasingly as payment for goods and services, but has yet to reach the mainstream.
Bitcoin was recently trading near $103,000, down more than 2% over the past 24 hours and more than 18% since reaching a high over $126,000 in early October.
Scott Norris, CMO at Omnes and CEO of independent Bitcoin miner Optiminer, said that the user clearly wasn’t paying attention.
“It’s not terribly hard—you can enter a custom transaction fee in many wallets,” he said. “Hard to say if it was an accident or on purpose though,” he continued, adding that the user might have been “really high.”
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