Not a Joke: Someone Paid $500K in For a $2,000 BTC Transaction

The crypto community on X (Twitter) was baffled recently after an anonymous Bitcoin user paid a whopping 19.89 BTC (over $500,000) in transaction fees to move just 0.074 BTC (worth less than $2,000 at current rates).

The payment went to the Bitcoin mining pool F2Pool that generated the valid block. The team behind the entity revealed that the transaction will be put on hold for three days in case the person or organization who conducted it wants to claim it back. Otherwise, it will be distributed across the BTC miners part of the pool.

According to Jameson Lopp – co-founder and CTO of the self-custody solution CasaHODL – the $500K transaction appears to be an exchange or payment processor with “buggy software”:

“They’ve received 60,000+ txns and sent 60,000+ txns from the same address (bad practice) and likely calculated their change output incorrectly,” he added.

Other X users suggested that the unusually high transaction could be some kind of a deal between the one who sent the funds and the Bitcoin mining pool. Crypto analyst “sunnydecree” put the assumption about laundering BTC on the table.

BREAKING NEWS:
Approximately two hours ago, in Block No. 807057, someone paid $500,000 for a #Bitcoin transaction. It’s likely there was an agreement between the user and F2Pool, who mined this valid block. The question arises: Why would they do that? Laundering #Bitcoin? pic.twitter.com/w1t1SRMALZ

— sunnydecree (@sunnydecree) September 10, 2023

It is worth mentioning that the average transaction fee when moving bitcoin is currently set at $2.18. The figure has varied over the years, typically spiking whenever the price of the primary cryptocurrency was heading up.

For example, BTC transaction fees surged above $30 in May this year when the asset’s valuation was eyeing $30,000.

The pool said the fees would be put on hold and if nobody reaches out in time, distributed to miners.