Someone Tried to Pay $5 in Bitcoin, Sent $137K Instead

There are bad days, and then there are days when you accidentally send $137,000 worth of bitcoin to somebody with no way to retrieve it.

This is apparently what happened to some unlucky person on Tuesday. A Twitter user spotted that somebody sent a bitcoin transaction amounting to roughly $5, but with a fee of 291.241 bitcoins, or $137,081.31, attached. This massive fee didn’t go to the intended recipient—they only got the fiver—but instead went to the person in the bitcoin network who processed the transaction.

According to the Twitter user, whomever sent this transaction likely meant to send the $137,000 to someone they knew, and just wanted to attach a $5 fee as a thank-you to the payment processor, but got it mixed up. Instead, they sent their pal enough change for a Starbucks coffee, and a bitcoin company enough cash to buy a new Maserati.

Since bitcoin wallet addresses are anonymous, it’s not apparent who sent or received the $5, but the big winner—the payment processor, or miner—was a company called BitClub Network. BitClub Network’s site says they run a mining pool in the Netherlands, which means that they enlist people all over the world to contribute computing power and then pay out the dividends. I’ve reached out to BitClub Network for comment, and will update this article if I hear back.

But, you may be wondering, how could this happen? Surely, it must have been a slip-up? Perhaps one that can befall anybody caught daydreaming for a split second while using bitcoin?

The answer is, basically, no. It is not easy to do this. There are a ton of different bitcoin wallets, but Bitcoin Core, one of the most popular wallet around, has a dedicated window in its settings where the fee paid per transaction can be changed manually. Normally, this is automatically calculated by Core. The window for deciding how much to send in a given transaction is in a completely different part of the program.

Image: Bitcoin.stackexchange.com

I can’t speak for every bitcoin wallet out there, but most automatically calculate transaction fees. Basically, without knowing how this anonymous user did this, it seems highly difficult to accidentally send nearly 300 bitcoins as a fee.

So, we’re left with two possible scenarios: either some muppet meant to send $137,000 to a small bitcoin company because he really, really just likes them a heck of a lot, or somebody fucked up. Big time.

Stay vigilant.

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Someone Tried to Pay $5 in Bitcoin, Sent $137K Instead