$9,300 fee on $120 Ethereum transaction

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It cost one heavy-handed Ethereum user $9,300 to send $120 on November 4th; at the time of the transaction, the average tx fee was only $1.07. The user goes by “ProudBitcoiner” on Reddit and is trying their best to get the money they overpaid back. 

If you are curious what actually happened… Metamask didn’t populate the “Gas Limit” field with the correct amount in my previous transaction and that transaction failed, so I decided to change it manually in the next transaction (this one), but instead of typing 200000 in “Gas Limit” input field, I wrote it on the “Gas Price” input field, so I payed 200000 GWEI for this transaction and destroyed my life :/

Said ProudBitcoiner on their Reddit post announcing their folly before going on to say that they are looking to get their money back. The transaction was mined almost immediately by Ethermine Pool–the same Ethereum mining Pool that created the block containing a transaction with a transaction fee worth $2.6 million attached to it in June.

“I contacted Ethermine on Twitter, I contacted their CEO Peter Pratscher on Twitter, I made this post here, I sent an e-mail to [email protected] and I [am] out of ideas,” said ProudBitcoiner. “If you know anyone from Ethermine, please share this post. Thank you guys for your support!”

ProudBitcoiner is having trouble getting in contact with Ethermine Pool and the Ethermine Pool team… and rightfully so. It would be extremely generous if Ethermine Pool did give ProudBitcoiner their money back and acknowledged that they made a mistake, however, Ethermine Pool has no obligation to do that. It is the transaction senders fault for making this mistake, not Ethermine Pools fault.

The permanence of the blockchain

Even if ProudBitcoiner used a hobby platform like Ethereum that has relatively high transaction fees compared to Bitcoin–ProudBitcoiner sent a transaction over a blockchain nonetheless. Although it did not work out in their favor, this folly serves as a great example of blockchain’s permanence and immutability. That’s why users are advised to double-check, and even triple check, if the wallet address and amount of money they are sending is correct–because if it’s not, they might end up sending money into the void or losing funds that the user can not get back–similar to what happened to ProudBitcoiner.