The largest unknown Bitcoin wallet moved nearly $1B for $0.48 in fees

If we both join the bitcoin network, we can exchange $1B for $0.48.<p>If we both join set up accounts at a regular bank like RBC, we can exchange $1B for free.<p>The point I&#x27;m making is that fees are not bitcoin&#x27;s strong point. Any financial network can undercut it. What <i>is</i> unique about bitcoin is that not everyone can get an account at RBC, but anyone can join the more expensive bitcoin network.

Unpopular opinion: why do we care so much about making it cheaper for rich people to move money around? Do we think somehow that will “trickle down” to us mere mortals and put western union and their ilk out of business?

Pretty sure the fund I work for moved several billion dollars for free on Friday...and will do the same thing again this Friday, the Friday after that, and the Friday after that.<p>Cryptocurrency&#x27;s obsession with fees is baffling. Fees are not why moving money is hard.

For all of the talk about how Bitcoin is not truly anonymous, this wallet demonstrates otherwise, with the apparent &#x27;anonymity proviso&#x27; being that you don&#x27;t do too much with it, and just let the coins sit.

How many times would you double check the address before hitting send? I would think to minimize risk, would slice this up into a few transactions...

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;decrypt.co&#x2F;31956&#x2F;an-ethereum-user-lost-5-2-million-in-two-massive-mistakes" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;decrypt.co&#x2F;31956&#x2F;an-ethereum-user-lost-5-2-million-i...</a><p>And if you fat-fingered the transaction, you could have transferred $0.48 for $1B in fees with no way to reverse that.

I don&#x27;t want to sound like a narc, but it seems like a really good idea to have some degree of oversight and safeguards on financial transactions of that magnitude.

I have to wonder how long until organized crime starts tracking down and shaking down large wallet holders. The profit is clearly there.

How much did they pay in exchange fees and &quot;slippage&quot; to convert that to dollars? And how long did it take to do that?

I find this a ridiculous thing to brag about. The only way Bitcoin will have low fees <i>is if it fails</i>. Since the network does not scale, if the network sees any substantial load the transaction fees will spike. We have already seen this happen back in 2017 at the peak of the bubble.<p>High fees are, in fact, part of the security model. The reward for &quot;mining&quot; a block will eventually dry up, so &quot;miners&quot; will be funded more and more by fees. Unless people are paying billions of dollars a year in fees, the financial incentive for &quot;miners&quot; will be too small to protect from bad actors.<p>Bitcoin can only have low fees if it both remains unpopular and dies before the block rewards dry up. Recommending Bitcoin because of its low fees is trying to sell it by predicting its failure.

Dayum. That&#x27;s about as much as I earn from my fiat in a year!

I&#x27;m a Bitcoin skeptic, and much of my skepticism is around the practicality of use for day-to-day transactions. Seeing low fees is very encouraging to me - the last I had checked, fees were in the several to many dollars range.<p>Now if they can hammer out the volatility, figure out a simple UX, encourage adoption at most places of business, and increase trust in exchanges for USD conversions, I&#x27;m on board.

A transparent ledger is an invitation for mobs to threaten and torture people! Identifying and threatening BTC owners is not that difficult. If we&#x27;re serious about protecting financial privacy, use something like Monero instead!

Is it also true that he&#x2F;she would have paid $480M to move $1B in BTC if it were moved $1 at a time?

Why does this mean anything. The average electronic transaction in shops and online in The Netherlands is a fraction of the cost of that.<p>Maybe it&#x27;s different for higher amounts of money, but it doesn&#x27;t matter.<p>Bitcoin is a solution to a problem nobody has figured out yet.

Are these Satoshi&#x27;s Bitcoins?

This is reckless and compromises the security of the Bitcoin network. A single transaction worth a billion dollars starts to create incentive for miners to 51% attack and reorg the chain.

so does this mean, someone paid cash or some asset worth $1billion in exchange for the bitcoins? Or is it just simply moving from one account to another owned by same person?

Joint NATO fund to pay ransomware fees.

SEPA transfers are free :)

Taking an educated guess here, that the miner of the block which moved that transaction must be related to the owner of that wallet. Nobody would otherwise accept such a low fee for a big transaction. Find the miner, you find the wallet owner.