Comments 1 - 5 of 5 Search these comments
Crypto is idiotic.
Every aspect about Bitcoin screams Scam. Yet people are all in like a Cult Religion.
I know a couple of start-ups in the space and they all have the same focus: AML. It's clear that blockchain's real virtues in applying cryptographically secured, publically interrogable ledgers will go nowhere unless it's evil twin, cryptocurrencies, are disciplined or disconnected from the conventional banking system to prevent economies to subject to the violence of vast money laundering operations animated by CC schemes. One report not long ago found that 80 percent of transactions through exchanges - except for COINBASE - were some kind of washing scheme orchestrated to pump a specific CC's face value at a given time.
Playing with this stuff is in the same league as buying scratch cards.
Someone appears to have made a mistake this morning when transferring the cryptocurrency ether (ETH), the younger sibling to bitcoin, from one digital wallet to another. After all, when moving around $134 dollars worth of digital currency, it hardly seems like anyone would intentionally pay a $2.6 million fee — and yet that's exactly what happened.
That's right. Someone paid 10,668.73185 ETH, worth approximately $2.6 million at the time, to move 0.55 ETH from one wallet to another. The transaction, in all its painful glory, is visible on Etherscan — a tool for viewing and searching ETH transactions.
While the internet loves a good conspiracy, and many on Twitter are speculating that this is evidence of some elaborate form of money laundering, a much simpler explanation is likely: a mistake.
Ethereum users can dictate the terms of their transactions, setting both the amount of ETH they want to send and the amount of fees they are willing to pay. The higher the fee, the thinking goes, the more likely their transaction will be included on the next block — i.e. it will go through more quickly. It's possible, therefore, that someone attempted to send $2.6 million worth of ETH with $134 in fees and simply reversed the two fields.
Of course, we are talking about cryptocurrency, so some kind of convoluted scam is always a possibility. However, this wouldn't be the first time that an unusually large fee has been paid on an otherwise small transaction. In February of 2019, someone accidentally paid 2,100 ETH in fees to move .1 ETH.
Coindesk reported at the time that the South Korean blockchain firm behind the error admitted to the mistake, contacted the mining pool that had benefitted, and worked out a deal where the firm got half of the accidentally sent ETH returned. Notably, that partial happy ending 100 percent relied on the goodwill of the mining pool, as ETH transactions are non-reversible by design.
https://apple.news/Ag0YVyaRJRvSrMoVbRao1YQ