Last week, there was a pretty wild situation involving AntPool, a Bitcoin mining group. They stumbled upon a jaw-dropping $3 million transaction fee during their operations. It was an accidental move by someone who was trying to transfer about $2.1 million in Bitcoin but ended up paying an insane fee of $3.1 million. Talk about a costly mistake!
AntPool, being responsible and all, decided to temporarily freeze the whole thing because of their risk control system. But now, they’ve announced that they’ll return the hefty fee, which set a new record for the biggest fee in U.S. dollars for a single Bitcoin transaction. They’re doing this by asking the rightful owner to verify themselves before December 10, 2023. To prove they’re the true owner, they need to use a signing tool like Electrum or Bitcoin Core and shoot the signed text over to AntPool’s support email address.
This person, “83_5BTC,” came forward claiming to be the one who got hit with that massive fee, blaming a hack on their wallet for the mishap. They even tried to move things to a safer place by transferring about 139 BTC to a new cold wallet, but guess what? Those funds got swiped almost instantly! They did provide a signed message to prove they owned the original wallet, but there’s doubt if the hacker might have used the compromised wallet to sign it.
From what Mononaut, a developer who goes by an alias, says, this chaos might have happened because the original wallet wasn’t very secure. It seems like it had low-security levels, making it an easy target for these kinds of attacks. They’re guessing something called “replace-by-fee” (RBF) might’ve been used to jack up the fee super fast to make the transaction go quicker. Mononaut’s theory is that more than one person might’ve been trying to swipe those funds, leading to this whole fee fiasco.
