And yet it happens - as does putting the value in the "fee" box!

I've never heard of someone successfully and unintentionally fat fingering a Bitcoin address typo to a valid Bitcoin address nobody owns. Fee box is a different thing, the recent $2.5m ETH headline you saw was not an accident but an attack/blackmail. Bitcoin core itself prevents you from using too high of a fee without an express override in the config.

Source on the $2.5m fee being related to attack/blackmail?

I just looked it up but I couldn't find anything saying as much... only that sparkpool kept it aside in case the owner comes forward?

Looks still unconfirmed https://decrypt.co/32145/hackers-blackmail-exchange-with-5-m...

>In short, the researchers claim that the hackers have gained access to an exchange’s funds. They are able to send money to certain whitelisted accounts that are marked as reliable in the exchange’s database to—but not to their own. So, they are sending the funds with excessively high transaction fees to sap the exchange’s accounts, and they’re demanding a ransom if it’s going to stop.

That's about the only thing that makes sense I suppose.

Thanks for the link!

You have a one in 232 chance of making a typo in an address and it being valid for P2PKH, its even less for modern bech32 addresses.

A 1 in 200 chance doesn't make much sense. In (legacy) addresses there's a 4 byte checksum done with sha256, so it should be something like a 1-in-4-billion (1 in 2^32) chance of a typo being valid. bech32 does something even smarter, but I'm not familiar with the details

The formatting was stripped. I meant 2^32.

Bitcoin Core specifically won't let you make transactions with "absurd" fee rates.