There has been news in the past about “X paid 1k in ETH fees, or X made a mistake and paid a lot of BTC transaction fees”. Most likely, they did not lose anything, because that weren’t mistakes and here’s why. The miners/mining pools help money laundering on the blockchain. That’s the reason why the transaction fee can be way more than the actual transaction amount if you were wondering.
Money laundering can be done only on a PoW(proof of work) network. A miner would select a transaction with high fee and place it into a Block, followed by solving the block and the network confirming the transaction. The Transaction fee will not disappear, it will be picked up by the miners that solved the block. In other words, the miner/s will receive the money that the sender sent by increasing the transaction fee. This method is a very good one to hide the source of funds.
One could do this with his own mining equipment. There is no need to race with other miners since the Block will be mined before the tx is made. The transaction is not broadcasted publicly before is confirmed, therefore others can’t take part in the mining.
Coinfirm has been analyzing and this is what they found since the Genesis BTC Block has been mined:
- 31,829 transactions with over 0.1 BTC in fees, totalling:$60,739,944.64(12295.05 BTC)
- 556 transactions had over 1 BTC in fees, totalling: $1,319,530.76 (5339.16 BTC)
- 127 transactions had over 10 BTC in fees, totaling: $637,965.83 (3557.38 BTC)
- 4 transactions had over 100 BTC in fees, totaling: $161,500.82 (774.04 BTC)
