Bitcoin dev says ‘fee is a fee’ about returning $510k paid by mistake

An expensive mistake of over half a million dollars sparked debates, goodwill, regrets, and controversial opinions in the Bitcoin (BTC) community recently.

It all started with the Bitcoin network fee overpayment of 19.82 BTC ($510,750) from an entity that later was revealed to be Paxos, to the lucky miner who discovered the block: F2Pool, the third largest Bitcoin mining pool in the world. This mistake occurred in block height 807057, on September 10.

Transaction with the overpaid Bitcoin fee. Source: mempool.space

Considering the average fee rate in this block, the supposed Paxos fee was overpaid 481,299 times. Block 807057 received a total of 20.013 BTC in fees, of which 99.04% came from this single transaction.

Bitcoin: Miner Reserve – F2Pool. Source: CryptoQuant

F2Pool is the third largest Bitcoin mining pool, having mined over 14% of all Bitcoin blocks in the last 12 months, responsible for this same amount of hashrate to the network.