"That's why people tell people to be careful, there's no question that the money has flown."
A Bitcoin (BTC) miner had just enjoyed a profit when an unknown network user mistakenly paid the 4 cryptocurrency worth $172,000 in transaction fees on Tuesday yesterday.
Explained further, the transaction itself only sends 2.9 BTC to the intended recipient, so here it can be seen that the fee attached is over 133% of the size of the transaction itself.
Regarding transactions in a post on X, Swan Bitcoin Editor-in-Chief Tomer Strolight said that when you merge UTXOs make sure you actually merge them instead of turning them into payments.
In context, a UTXO is an Unspent Transaction Output that transfers individual BTC sitting separately in a user's wallet, where the transfer can be considered part of the user's controlled BTC.
The best way is to avoid splitting one's BTC into several small UTXOs mainly due to the economics of follow-up when sending a large amount of BTC, the user must pay a fee on each moving UTXO which means the transaction will be more and more expensive.
However, on-chain data shows high-paid users are trying to consolidate their UTXOs to avoid the problem through the technique of merging several smaller outputs into a larger one.
Although BTC transactions and fees are not actually refundable, overpaid transfers are often refunded by the miners who receive them, for example Bitcoin mining pool F2Pool in September 2023 returned funds to Paxos after accidentally paying $500,000 for a BTC transaction.
A few months later, mining pool giant Antpool paid back $3.1 million of record-breaking anonymous users to miners.
