A Bitcoin user’s attempt to consolidate their Unspent Transaction Outputs (UTXOs) resulted in a significant and expensive mistake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Blockchain data reveals that an unidentified user paid a staggering 4 BTC ($172,000) in transaction fees on Tuesday, far exceeding the amount required to process the transaction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A Costly Oversight<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n According to data from mempool.space, the transaction itself only sent 2.9 BTC to the intended recipient, making the attached fee over 133% of the transaction’s value.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By the site’s metrics, the transaction was overpaid by a factor of 29,992 times. Specifically, the user paid 1,800,890 satoshis per vByte (sat\/vB), a metric used to calculate the demand for Bitcoin block space at a given time. In contrast, the standard transaction for that block paid only about 60 sat\/vB.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tomer Strolight, editor-in-chief for Swan Bitcoin, commented on the transaction, saying, “When you’re consolidating UTXOs, make sure to actually consolidate them instead of turning one into a fee.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n UTXOs, or Unspent Transaction Outputs, represent individual BTC transfers held separately within a user’s Bitcoin wallet. These transfers can be seen as chunks of bitcoin controlled by the user, some larger than others, and collectively forming the user’s wallet balance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In general, it is advisable to avoid splitting one’s BTC into numerous small UTXOs, especially for economic reasons. When sending large sums of BTC later, a fee must be paid for each UTXO that moves, making the transaction more costly with more UTXOs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On-chain data suggests that the user with the high fee was attempting to consolidate their UTXOs to address this issue, a technique for merging several smaller outputs into a larger one. A few days prior, the same user had received two Bitcoin transactions, each worth 2.9 BTC and 4.03 BTC, which corresponded to the values of their Tuesday transfer and fee, respectively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Will the User Be Reimbursed?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Although Bitcoin transactions and fees are technically irreversible, miners who receive overpaid fees have occasionally refunded them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For instance, in September, Bitcoin mining pool F2Pool returned funds to Paxos after the latter accidentally paid $500,000 in Bitcoin transaction fees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Months later, mining pool giant Antpool reimbursed an anonymous user’s record-breaking $3.1 million fee to miners.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A Bitcoin user’s attempt to consolidate their Unspent Transaction Outputs (UTXOs) resulted in a significant and expensive mistake.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4127,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[35,44],"class_list":["post-4126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-bitocin","tag-blockchain"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stoneblock.hr\/hr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stoneblock.hr\/hr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stoneblock.hr\/hr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stoneblock.hr\/hr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stoneblock.hr\/hr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4126"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stoneblock.hr\/hr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4126\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4128,"href":"https:\/\/stoneblock.hr\/hr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4126\/revisions\/4128"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stoneblock.hr\/hr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stoneblock.hr\/hr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stoneblock.hr\/hr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stoneblock.hr\/hr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}