Source: Cointelegraph Original: "{title}"

A seemingly panicked Bitcoin user paid nearly 0.75 Bitcoin (approximately $60,000 at the time) in transaction fees during a "Replace-By-Fee" (RBF) transaction.

The problematic transaction occurred after 9:30 AM on April 8. This was the second attempt to perform a "Replace-By-Fee" (RBF), modifying the transaction's target address, sending 0.48 Bitcoin ($37,770), and including 0.2 BTC in change ($16,357).

Second Bitcoin RBF transaction. Source: Mempool.Space

Anmol Jain, Vice President of Investigations at cryptocurrency forensic firm AMLBot, told Cointelegraph that the original transaction used a "default or conservative" fee. The first RBF nearly doubled the fee and changed the output address.

Both transactions were waiting for confirmations that would never come. This was because the higher-fee RBF transaction replaced the second RBF transaction and used the same output address—likely to increase the fee to ensure the RBF transaction was processed instead of the original transaction.

The transaction showed signs of a panicked error, with the user quickly sending a follow-up transaction to prevent the original transaction from being included in a block and becoming final. Jain proposed several possible explanations:

"Perhaps he intended to use 30.5692 sat, but due to haste or a slip of the hand, ended up using 305,692 sat."

The second RBF transaction also added an extra unspent transaction output (UTXO). This UTXO contained nearly 0.75 BTC. The change was mistakenly included as part of the fee, possibly because the user failed to update the change address or misjudged the transaction structure.

Another possibility proposed by Jain is that the user confused absolute fees with fees per virtual byte (transaction size), or there was a flaw in the automated script behind the transaction. The wallet might have allowed the user to set fees in satoshi, which could lead to setting the fee too low, triggering warnings about low fees, and subsequently resulting in an excessive correction:

"The system read it as a total fee of 30 sats, which is too low, so the user entered 305000 thinking it meant 30.5 sat/vB, while the wallet actually applied 305,000 sats/vB, which is just crazy."

Replace-By-Fee (RBF) is a widely misunderstood and controversial feature in Bitcoin. Transactions are considered non-final until they are packed into a block and confirmed by more blocks on the same chain.

Transactions in the mempool are entirely dependent on miners' choices—who are typically profit-driven. Bitcoin developers anticipated that when multiple conflicting Bitcoin transactions arise, processing the transaction with the higher fee would provide greater economic incentive.

Due to the decentralized nature of the network, it is neither easy to prevent Bitcoin miners from prioritizing the first sent transaction nor easy to accurately determine which transaction was submitted first. Therefore, this incentive mechanism was formally incorporated into the RBF feature, allowing users to edit unconfirmed transactions by submitting a replacement transaction with a higher fee.

This has sparked some controversy in the past. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) supporter Hayden Otto claimed in 2019 that the RBF feature posed a risk of double spending in Bitcoin. In contrast, Bitcoin Cash removed this feature and claimed that unconfirmed transactions on its network are final and can be safely accepted.

However, considering how blockchains operate, RBF-like transactions still occasionally occur on the Bitcoin Cash network. This is because RBF is essentially an inherent property of the Bitcoin consensus mechanism, formally established as a feature in Bitcoin.

Related: The risk of Bitcoin crashing to $70,000 within ten days is increasing—analysts say this is BTC's "real bottom."

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