But it was almost as fast as using a credit card! ;)

Edit: OK I did not see the "k" after the 500, that's insane.

Well the euronet atm I just used wanted EUR 9.99 im fees to withdraw EUR 40.

Not as bad but also kind of ridiculous.

At least I can still opt out of the convertion and pay the ridiculous transaction fee of EUR 3.95 to have my bank convert the EUR 40 to CHF.

Avoid Euronet everywhere in Europe, just find a bank or credit union with an ATM, they will charge you no or very little fees usually, unfortunately Euronet have a lot of ATMs at airports and in tourist hotspots but their fees and conversion rates are very bad.

Euronet is basically a scam imho.

To be clear, it's not that someone asked for this fee. You put fees on a transaction to incentivize miners to include your transaction in the next block. So I don't think there was a scam here.

Agreed, likely a software bug. However, I'm not sure if that's better or worse.

"I must have put a decimal point in the wrong place, I always mess up some mundane detail" - Office space

In this case it's probably not a fat-finger and more likely to be a software bug. The popular clients have warnings against against absurd fees, and even if you're crafting your own transactions (which might lead to absurdly high fees if you don't neglected to have "change" outputs), bitcoin core will check for this when you're trying to broadcast the transaction[1].

[1] https://developer.bitcoin.org/reference/rpc/sendrawtransacti...

the quote from the film also talks about a software bug ;)

Is it possible this was a form of laundering or insider theft? I.e. could the intended transaction not have actually been broadcast to all miners?

You'd have to ensure that miner can score a block in a reasonable time. That would be a lot of hassle with a setup likely worth over 500k. Not impossible, but really unlikely.

(Also that reward went to the f2pool's publicly known address https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/transactions/btc/99451c2... - so that wouldn't make sense as a destination, because it gets split between lots of miners)

I'd think an insider could keep a transaction hanging at any given time in many accounts payable situations, but taking all that risk to share a tiny portion of a pool would be pretty silly..

It looks to me much like the way to sell marijuana by selling an old newspaper for $50 with a packet of weed as a free gift with it.

I suppose that $1865 is a reasonably small price to send $500k to someone concealed as a service charge.

I've no experience with crypto but a lot with UI. Is it possible that they were trying to send 500K for 1865 and entered the numbers in the wrong inputs ? Software asked them to confirm. They saw the correct digits and pressed ok.

IIRC, bitcoin transactions are structured to always send the entire wallet balance every time, and the way to avoid doing that is to send almost all of the money back to the current wallet address in a self loop. Then, any money that isn't listed with a destination becomes the miner fee.

So they may have just forgotten to add the field that sends the money in a self-loop, and by default the account was drained by the miner fee.

This is obviously a terrible design but it can't be changed.

it's done like that because it uses less bits in the payment script.

you can do it other ways, but it'll cost more. bitcoin's fairly freeform like that.

That's not how it works. You can't guarantee where the fee goes. It's assigned pretty much randomly to some miner or a pool.

Unless the transaction is only advertised to the miner they intend and they wait until that miner finds a block?

Does this mean some random miner just got a windfall?

Yes.

Yes but they say if someone claim the funds they will return to the owner.

This is not that uncommon.

The miner signs a tx with that insane fee, but intentionally doesn't broadcast it (so nobody can include that tx but themselves).

When he finds a block, that tx is included and he's basically paying himself.

It's mostly done for the memes.

See the post below why this is unlikely: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37473536

That’s not what this person is saying. What they’re saying is that the miner (in this case the same person as the sender) signed a transaction with an insane fee and kept it private. The miner then solved a block. Finally, the miner then includes their transaction in the block because they’re allowed to pick what transactions to include. This would only happen for a “memey” reason because the miner is technically losing out on a transactions worth of fees but it does generate headlines like this which I would say would be worth $1-3.

Not likely what happened in this case but theoretically possible with the technology.

Well, talk about commitment! Someone really knows how to keep a promise, no matter the price tag!

For sure this was due to some bug in the software, since must be some exchange creating the transactions manually and for some reason the change address was not set so the blockchain assumed the remaining was all blockchain fees (just a supposition).

Also, imagine having so much time to spare you create an entire website to hate on Web3.