Bitcoin user accidentally pays $103,000 in fees to send nothing at all

Miners took every last satoshi as a fee, while the transaction's only output carried no value. In effect, the sender paid a six-figure toll to move nothing.

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How a script ate an entire balance

The cause was a feature called Replace-by-Fee, or RBF. It lets a user resubmit a stuck, unconfirmed Bitcoin transaction with a higher fee to jump ahead in the queue of pending payments. It exists for a good reason: fee estimates go stale within minutes, and a payment can otherwise sit unconfirmed for hours.

But the sender's automated script had no sensible limit. Instead of stopping at a reasonable ceiling, it raised the fee once every second, and each new version ate deeper into the wallet's balance. 

On-chain records show the escalation clearly: successive versions of the transaction jumped from a fee of a few hundred dollars, to more than $1,000, to over $9,000, before the final version swallowed the entire input at nearly $103,000.

Bitcoin's network accepted it anyway, because the protocol places no cap on what a sender can hand to miners. The wallet, which had received about 1.77 BTC over its life, was left empty.

But the sender's automated script had no sensible limit. Instead of stopping at a reasonable ceiling, it raised the fee once every second, and each new version ate deeper into the wallet's balance.

On-chain records show the escalation clearly: successive versions of the transaction jumped from a fee of a few hundred dollars, to more than $1,000, to over $9,000, before the final version swallowed the entire input at nearly $103,000.