Someone Sent $166 Million in Bitcoin for Just $1.25 in Fees

The average Bitcoin transaction fee on December 7 was around $4.32.

Sometime yesterday, you may have heard the sound of giddy laughter. If you did, it may have been coming from whoever sent 8,692 Bitcoin for the fee of just 0.0000652 BTC.

In dollar terms, with Bitcoin fetching around $19,000 over the past few days, that equates to paying $1.25 to send $166 million.

Try doing that at your local bank.

The sender made off like a bandit. The average transaction fee yesterday was 0.00023 BTC ($4.32), according to data from BitInfoCharts.

Unlike for traditional financial institutions, there’s no set price (or percentage) to send crypto over the Bitcoin network. Strictly speaking, fees aren’t actually required but are instead added by senders to incentivize miners to process their payment. More transactions means more competition to have transactions included in a block.

Yet despite Bitcoin setting an all-time high price this month, trading volumes aren’t at comparably high levels. Yesterday, $27.2 billion in Bitcoin was sent over the Bitcoin network, according to data from CoinMarketCap—nothing to sniff at, but a ho-hum day in the history of the network.

The $163 million transaction, with a hash starting in 4cd6be7, occurred in block number 660,422. As low as the fee was, other transactions within that same block cost nothing at all. Someone else sent 481 BTC ($9 million) for nary a penny, for instance. 

On the other hand, the person who paid 0.003 BTC to send/receive 1 BTC probably feels like they could’ve found better ways to spend $56.