Accidentally pay an 80BTC transaction fee? Please contact us for a refund

Re:Accidentally pay an 80BTC transaction fee? Please contact... by wmf on Friday July 07, 2017 @02:22PM (#14720749)

There is a way to mostly prevent these errors BTW: Change the transaction format so that the sum of input values must equal the sum of output values (edit: including a special fee output which should only be ~8 bytes); this would prevent money from being "lost" as fees. If someone is planning to change the transaction format anyway (ahem) maybe they could also add this safety feature.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Accidentally pay an 80BTC transaction fee? Please contact... by zwily on Friday July 07, 2017 @02:43PM (#14720937)

That would eliminate fees entirely as well, unless you're proposing an additional "fee" output. That would take additional space, which means it won't flow as space is at a premium. I don't know of any wallet software that would let someone do this, so this must have been a manually-created transaction.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Accidentally pay an 80BTC transaction fee? Please contact... by wmf on Friday July 07, 2017 @02:51PM (#14721005)

If only there was some way to increase the space available for transactions!

But your overall point is well taken: Bitcoin is sociopathic software where "sorry for your loss" is considered a feature, not a bug. Nonstandard hand-rolled transaction? Fuck you, you deserve to get robbed.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Accidentally pay an 80BTC transaction fee? Please contact... by zwily on Friday July 07, 2017 @02:57PM (#14721066)

> If only there was some way to increase the space available for transactions!

Hehe.

> But your overall point is well taken: Bitcoin is sociopathic software where "sorry for your loss" is considered a feature, not a bug. Nonstandard hand-rolled transaction? Fuck you, you deserve to get robbed.

Well except, in this case, the miner is offering to give the fee back. In general, you're right though. :)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Accidentally pay an 80BTC transaction fee? Please contact... by TD-Linux on Friday July 07, 2017 @03:20PM (#14721263)

Even if you hand-roll a transaction, when you try to send it, Bitcoin Core will parse it and refuse to send it if the fees are too high:

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/2949

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Accidentally pay an 80BTC transaction fee? Please contact... by pas on Sunday July 09, 2017 @07:32AM (#14729267)

There's always more space in the mempool :)

And IBLT can amortize block latency very effectively https://bitcoincore.org/en/2015/12/23/capacity-increases-faq...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Accidentally pay an 80BTC transaction fee? Please contact... by throwaway2016a on Friday July 07, 2017 @02:48PM (#14720984)

Semantically that is problematic. You don't know who the person who successfully mines the transaction is going to be so there is technical no "output" to give it to until the block is mined.

Perhaps an extra header field with the fee amount that needs to match the unspent inputs would work.

Edit: and as another commenter pointed out, if you set the output to someone other than the miner you are doing a 0 fee transaction which is discouraged and in bitcoin, highly unlikely to end up in a block.

[ Parent | on HN ]