on the crypto
Bitfly, the company behind the Ethermine pool, announced on Monday that it had opted to distribute a total of 10.668 ETH (worth just under $ 2,4 million) of transaction fees to miners who were active at the time of the extraordinary transaction.
"Since the sender of the transaction ... didn't contact us after 4 days, we made the final decision to distribute the commission to the miners in our pool," tweeted Bitfly. "Given the amount in question, we believe that 4 days is enough to allow the sender to contact us."
Two crazy transactions in less than 24 hours
Around 04:00 UTC on Thursday morning, a single address with a substantial ETH balance sent 350 ETH with the mind-blowing commission worth $ 2,6 million at the time of the transaction. This was the second such transaction in two days.
The same wallet address had sent only 0,55 ETH ($ 133) the day before, paying another $ 2,6 million millionaire commission from the China-based mining pool, Spark Pool.
When the network runs smoothly, the average fee for an ether transaction hovers around quota $ 0,50. Two transactions would therefore cost around $ 1. But in total this single wallet, which has not been identified, paid over $ 5,2 million in fees for these two transactions alone.
An unsustainable flow of fake senders has flooded the mining pool
Spark Pool blocked the transaction to give the sender time to contact them and work on an agreement to recover some of the transaction fees. When it happened the second time, less than a day later, Ethermine followed the colleagues' example and gave the sender a few days to get in touch with them.
But no one trusted came forward. Rather, Bitfly claimed to have received requests from "multiple people [who] claimed to be the sender of this transaction, [but] none of them were able to produce a valid signature of the sending account."
A grace that the pool will not grant a second time
Perhaps due to the sheer volume of bogus claims, the company said it will no longer freeze transaction fees in the future, regardless of their value. "In the future, we will no longer interfere in paying high commissions," tweeted the company.
"Our advertised payment policy is to always distribute the reward in full and will adhere to the reward independent of the amount in question." Spark Pool still had the transaction blocked at the time of going to print and hadn't heard from the sender.
