Related true story: I wrote a free e-book about Bitcoin[1], and Bitcoin dev lead Gavin Andresen wanted to send a donation as thanks. He apparently meant to send $10, but sent 10 BTC by accident. (worth $3,000 at the time, now worth $25,000)<p>He emailed me and my co author asking (very politely!) for us to send it back, which we did (minus some amount to make it come out to the intended donation).<p>You can see the transactions here: <a href="https://blockchain.info/address/19QsxWwNyeQ9NceaXZFXkHSHbdKCibjYKR" rel="nofollow">https://blockchain.info/address/19QsxWwNyeQ9NceaXZFXkHSHbdKC...</a><p>(And verify that address matches up with the donation address on the site).<p>[1] <a href="http://understandingbitcoin.us" rel="nofollow">http://understandingbitcoin.us</a>
<i>the correct fee should have been approximately 2BTC.</i><p>At current rates isn't that a $5,000ish transaction fee?<p>Have I misunderstood something? That seems like a crazy amount, especially given the hype surrounding Bitcoin.
This happens when someone manually crafts a transaction.<p>In Bitcoin, if you have an input of 100 BTC and make a transaction with a single output of 20 BTC, the remaining 80 BTC are kept by the miner. There's no wallet software that would let you do this.<p>It's like paying a $20 check with a $100 bill and saying "keep the change."
There is a way to mostly prevent these errors BTW: Change the transaction format so that the sum of input values must equal the sum of output values (edit: including a special fee output which should only be ~8 bytes); this would prevent money from being "lost" as fees. If someone is planning to change the transaction format anyway (ahem) maybe they could also add this safety feature.
What's a likely solution here? I'm perplexed on how they can do anything to help this transaction fee, without just giving money away.<p>Thoughts?