Prominent Bitcoin mining pool AntPool has agreed to refund a record $3 million transaction fee, pending verification of the original owner’s identity.
AntPool, a major player in Bitcoin mining, plans to return a whopping $3 million transaction fee, but only if the true owner can prove their identity. This situation involves a huge fee of 83.65 BTC (about $3.1 million) just to move 55.77 BTC (about $2.1 million).
The transaction occurred on November 23, with a much higher than normal fee, more than 120,000 times what it should have been. The transaction not only broke records for the cost of a Bitcoin transaction, but also showed how circumstances can change quickly with the digital currency.
AntPool suspended the fee and now asks the person who sent the transaction to prove who they are with a special tool and a private key.
This event is similar to when Paxos, a company that works with cryptocurrencies, accidentally overpaid $500,000 due to an error. F2Pool, the mining pool involved, eventually returned the funds.
Bitcoin user “83_5BTC” claims he was hacked, resulting in a huge fee. The anonymous user believes that the wallet was breached and that the high fee was the result of a script that altered the fee amount. Mononaut, a developer of the Bitcoin tracker Mempool, verified the claim and reported that it appeared legitimate, but questions remain about whether an attack occurred.
Mononaut theorizes that the problem may be due to the use of a weak and easy-to-guess wallet type. The transaction was also made faster using a special feature of Bitcoin (BTC), which could mean that several hackers were trying to steal the money, increasing the fee while trying to extract the funds before another cybercriminal could finish the transaction.
