Paxos, a cryptocurrency services company, paid a $520,000 charge on a transaction worth only $2,000 earlier this week, and the bitcoin mining pool F2Pool has now repaid 19.8 bitcoin (BTC) to Paxos.The overpayment, according to Paxos, was caused by a “bug” in the corporate operations branch of the company.The normal transaction cost for bitcoin is $20 maximum.The funds were given back to Paxos on Friday, according to blockchain data.
After a transaction is approved on the Bitcoin blockchain, miners are paid a fee in bitcoin.Users have the option of adjusting fees to prioritize some transactions over others.
“After conducting identity verification, we have confirmed the ownership of these BTC, and fully refunded the fee to the sender,” F2Pool wrote on X.
The return follows a lot of debate within the bitcoin ecosystem, with people like Chun Wang, the founder of Stake.fish, declaring that he “regretted” agreeing to a refund with Paxos.
Jameson Lopp, a co-founder of Casa Hodl and a pioneering bitcoin developer, commended Bitcoin as a “cooperative network” after the money was reimbursed.
“Bitcoin is an adversarial network, but on the flip side it’s also a cooperative network,” Lopp wrote on X. “Miners are humans too, and they realize that people make mistakes. While retaining egregious transaction fees makes for a nice short-term profit, returning those funds is the humane decision.”