The Ethereum user spends $ 9,500 in fees by sending only $ 120 in a mistake to forget

An Ethereum user mistakenly paid $ 9,500 in transaction fees to send just $ 120. The user, identified by his Reddit nickname “Proudbitcoiner”, claims the transaction “destroyed my life” and is now desperately asking miners to return the money.

According to a November 4 post on Reddit, Proudbitcoiner claimed that he accidentally typed the wrong transaction fee, leading to a transfer of amounts nearly 80 times the expected size.

In total, the user, who was trading tokens on Uniswap via the Metamask ethereum wallet, paid 23.5 ether (ETH), worth around $ 10,300 at the time of writing. ETH fees averaged $ 1.07 when Proudbitcoiner placed the transaction.

The funds were immediately pocketed by the mining pool Ethermine, a unit of the crypto miner Bitfly, which coincidentally created the block containing a transaction with a fee of 2.6 million dollars in June.

“Metamask didn’t 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 input field “Gas price”, so I paid 200000 Gwei for this transaction and I destroyed my life “, explained Proudbitcoiner.

Transaction fees on the Ethereum blockchain are paid in “gas” and measured in “gwei”, a system that can be confusing for many people. Gas allows you to carry out a transaction on the network, provided that the miners accept the price threshold.

Users can set limits on the maximum amount of gas they are willing to spend per transaction. Combined with the “gas price”, indicated in small quantities of ether called “gwei”, the two set the commission per transaction on the Ethereum network.

And since miners prioritize transactions with the highest fees, the Proudbitcoiner transfer was processed in seconds. Now, they beg that the miner return the money. The user complained:

I contacted Ethermine on Twitter, I contacted their CEO Peter Pratscher on Twitter, I wrote this post here… I’m running out of ideas. Ethermine, because they pulled the block my transaction was a part of and it’s their good will whether they want to return it or not.

Ethermine is not obligated to refund the money. When he encountered a similar problem on a $ 2.6 million transaction fee in June, the miner held the funds for four days, intending to pay back the owner, but later distributed the block reward to the miners. within its pool.

Bitfly, the parent company of Ethermine, said so at the time he will not investigate or refund such errors in the future.

What do you think of Proudbitcoiner’s mistake? Let us know in the comments section below.

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