Avoid Euronet everywhere in Europe, just find a bank or credit union with an ATM, they will charge you no or very little fees usually, unfortunately Euronet have a lot of ATMs at airports and in tourist hotspots but their fees and conversion rates are very bad.
To be clear, it's not that someone asked for this fee. You put fees on a transaction to incentivize miners to include your transaction in the next block. So I don't think there was a scam here.
A bug like that would affect everyone using the program to make transactions. Not a likely bug for just one person to experience. And what are the odds that the one person first finding this bug had a crypto wallet with $500k in funds inside of it? I think another explanation from this comments section is actually more likely... That the person who set $500k for their transaction fees did so on purpose, didn't broadcast the transaction to the rest of the network, and waited for their miner to win a block to include that transaction to pay themselves $500k for memes.
What's the motivation? To get us all to talk about it here, of course. And soak up the controversy some day with their morning coffee. All the while the user lost nothing. Maybe there's more sinister tax/income reasons, but to be honest I find this unlikely with how transparent blockchain transactions are. Any idiot with just a basic understanding of how blockchain transactions work can look at a blockchain explorer and say it's likely that wallet A and wallet B are owned by the same person.
In this case it's probably not a fat-finger and more likely to be a software bug. The popular clients have warnings against against absurd fees, and even if you're crafting your own transactions (which might lead to absurdly high fees if you don't neglected to have "change" outputs), bitcoin core will check for this when you're trying to broadcast the transaction[1].
You'd have to ensure that miner can score a block in a reasonable time. That would be a lot of hassle with a setup likely worth over 500k. Not impossible, but really unlikely.
I'd think an insider could keep a transaction hanging at any given time in many accounts payable situations, but taking all that risk to share a tiny portion of a pool would be pretty silly..
Even if the fee funds just made it back to the user who made the initial transaction (by way of them winning the block on their miner) how could that be made a laundering scheme? Genuinely curious how that could work, because if you can tie a person or entity to a specific wallet address, you can see in any blockchain explorer that funds left and re-entered your wallet. You can see what gas fees were in the block, and who won that block. I guess the main thing the person could do is ensure that transaction is included in a block won by a miner under their control but using a different wallet address, one that isn't as obviously tied to the original owner of those funds. But then how do you go about using those funds anywhere? And if you do use those funds anywhere, you have to imagine people are watching what both wallets are doing from that point on in a blockchain explorer. You've just put more public awareness on yourself, and presumably you only moved the money because you suspect someone knew you were tied to the original wallet so it's not like you're free and clear, people (law enforcement) are going to assume you are in some way associated with the destination wallet too.
The destination wallet's owner would also legally need to pay income tax (assuming they're US based), so if they don't, they're now also on the hook for tax evasion, raising even more attention to themselves. But I don't know the crypto income tax situation for other countries.
I've no experience with crypto but a lot with UI. Is it possible that they were trying to send 500K for 1865 and entered the numbers in the wrong inputs ? Software asked them to confirm. They saw the correct digits and pressed ok.
IIRC, bitcoin transactions are structured to always send the entire wallet balance every time, and the way to avoid doing that is to send almost all of the money back to the current wallet address in a self loop. Then, any money that isn't listed with a destination becomes the miner fee.
So they may have just forgotten to add the field that sends the money in a self-loop, and by default the account was drained by the miner fee.
This is obviously a terrible design but it can't be changed.
That’s not what this person is saying. What they’re saying is that the miner (in this case the same person as the sender) signed a transaction with an insane fee and kept it private. The miner then solved a block. Finally, the miner then includes their transaction in the block because they’re allowed to pick what transactions to include. This would only happen for a “memey” reason because the miner is technically losing out on a transactions worth of fees but it does generate headlines like this which I would say would be worth $1-3.
Not likely what happened in this case but theoretically possible with the technology.
For sure this was due to some bug in the software, since must be some exchange creating the transactions manually and for some reason the change address was not set so the blockchain assumed the remaining was all blockchain fees (just a supposition).
Also, imagine having so much time to spare you create an entire website to hate on Web3.
32 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadWell the euronet atm I just used wanted EUR 9.99 im fees to withdraw EUR 40.
Not as bad but also kind of ridiculous.
At least I can still opt out of the convertion and pay the ridiculous transaction fee of EUR 3.95 to have my bank convert the EUR 40 to CHF.
What's the motivation? To get us all to talk about it here, of course. And soak up the controversy some day with their morning coffee. All the while the user lost nothing. Maybe there's more sinister tax/income reasons, but to be honest I find this unlikely with how transparent blockchain transactions are. Any idiot with just a basic understanding of how blockchain transactions work can look at a blockchain explorer and say it's likely that wallet A and wallet B are owned by the same person.
[1] https://developer.bitcoin.org/reference/rpc/sendrawtransacti...
(Also that reward went to the f2pool's publicly known address https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/transactions/btc/99451c2... - so that wouldn't make sense as a destination, because it gets split between lots of miners)
The destination wallet's owner would also legally need to pay income tax (assuming they're US based), so if they don't, they're now also on the hook for tax evasion, raising even more attention to themselves. But I don't know the crypto income tax situation for other countries.
I suppose that $1865 is a reasonably small price to send $500k to someone concealed as a service charge.
So they may have just forgotten to add the field that sends the money in a self-loop, and by default the account was drained by the miner fee.
This is obviously a terrible design but it can't be changed.
you can do it other ways, but it'll cost more. bitcoin's fairly freeform like that.
The miner signs a tx with that insane fee, but intentionally doesn't broadcast it (so nobody can include that tx but themselves).
When he finds a block, that tx is included and he's basically paying himself.
It's mostly done for the memes.
Not likely what happened in this case but theoretically possible with the technology.
Also, imagine having so much time to spare you create an entire website to hate on Web3.