On September 10, an unknown user paid 1,982,108,632 satoshis ($510,750) in fees to miners for transferring 0.074 BTC.
Will put these 20 BTC on hold for now. To be redistributed to miners if nobody comes to claim it after three days. https://t.co/GsRUnAP9jQ
— Chun (@satofishi) September 11, 2023
According to journalist Colin Wu, to date this is the largest dollar-denominated payment for a transaction confirmation.
Meanwhile, the average fee in the Bitcoin network stands at 0.000084 BTC ($2.18), according to BitInfoCharts.
Representatives of the F2Pool mining pool, which mined the block, said they would temporarily hold back these 19.8 BTC. After three days they will redistribute them among miners.
Most likely, the sender made a mistake when forming the payment.
A similar incident occurred, for example, in April 2016, when an unknown sender sent 0.0001 BTC with a fee of 291.2 BTC (~$136 000 at the time). The mining-pool BitClub that received the funds also expressed willingness to return them to the user.
Earlier ForkLog reported that in the second quarter of 2023 bitcoin miners earned $184 million in fees. This was 270% higher than in the previous period and exceeded the figure for all of 2022.
In July 2020, an unknown user moved 132,255 BTC in two minutes (about $1.3 billion at the time). The total fee was just $1.9.