In the letter
- An Ethereum user made a mistake while submitting a transaction on the Ethereum blockchain.
- They accidentally raised the transaction fee to $ 9,300.
- They ask the miners to return the money, but they are not required to do so.
An Ethereum user accidentally spent $ 9,300 in transaction fees to send just $ 120. They are now asking miners to selflessly return the money, although they are not obligated to do so.
A pseudonymous account known as “ProudBitcoiner” posted their experience on Reddit, posting a link to the transaction to verify it. The Ethereum user claimed that he mistyped the wrong transaction fee when trading, accidentally spending 23 Ethereum (ETH). Transaction fees are paid in “Gas” and numbered in “Gwei”, a system that can be unfamiliar and difficult to use.
The transaction was done via MetaMask, a popular Ethereum wallet in the browser, while the user used the Uniswap exchange to trade the tokens. It was collected by the mining company Ethermine in less than 30 seconds (miners tend to prioritize transactions with higher transaction fees).
“Metamask did not fill the” Gas Limit “field with the correct amount in my previous transaction and that transaction failed, so I decided to manually change it in the next transaction (this one), but instead of typing 200000 in” Gas Limit ” input field, I wrote it in the “gas price” input field, so I paid 200,000 Gwei for this transaction and destroyed my life, “explained the user.
Fund transfers on the Ethereum network require the entry of a gas commission prior to any transaction. These are then paid to miners, entities that run powerful computer machines to keep a blockchain network running.
A Gas “limit” is the maximum amount of Gas a user is willing to pay per transaction, while the Gas price is the amount of Gwei that a user can spend on each unit of Gas. Together, the limit and price combine to set the fees per transaction on the Ethereum network and change continuously based on the demand and activity of the network. Hence the confusion.
For reference, data from monitoring site ETH Gas Station shows that Ethereum fees are currently only quoted at around 24-33 Gwei per transaction, a fraction of what ProudBitcoiner paid to Ethermine yesterday.
Meanwhile, the user is now trying to recover some of the lost commissions. “I contacted Ethermine on Twitter, I contacted their CEO Peter Pratscher on Twitter, I wrote this post here … I’m running out of ideas,” they said in a post.
Ethermine, for its part, has not yet responded to requests made by the Reddit user and is not obligated to do so. Any typos during crypto transactions are final in nature and miners would only return their earnings if they so wish.
Despite that, ProudBitcoiner he is not yet losing hope. “Ethermine, because they pulled the block that my transaction was part of and it’s their goodwill whether they want to return it or not,” they added.
The company’s parent company, BitFly, faced a similar conundrum earlier this year when someone paid over $ 2.6 million in ETH as part of the transaction fees in a block mined by Ethermine. However, BitFly pocketed the money after holding the funds for four days and stated that any similar problems in the future will not be subject to any investigation or refund.
It appears that being your own bank carries a much greater responsibility.