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The Miners That Received $2.6 Million Worth of ETH Transaction Fees Will Keep The Money

source-logo  cryptopotato.com 15 June 2020 17:17, UTC

The mining pool, which processed a mysterious Ethereum transfer carrying a needlessly excessive $2.6 million transaction fee, has announced it will distribute the millions among its miners.

Bitfly, which operates the Ethermine mining pool, announced the decision on Monday, stating that four days is long enough for someone to have come to claim it.

Miners Will Keep $2.6 Million Ethereum Fee

As announced by BitFly via Twitter on June 15:

As the sender of the transaction https://t.co/h21A2Th4fw has not contacted us after 4 days we have made the final decision to distribute the tx fee to the miners of our pool. Given the amount involved we believe 4 days is sufficient time for the sender to get in touch with us.

— Bitfly (@etherchain_org) June 15, 2020

The saga began on June 10 when someone paid a $2.6 million transaction fee to send 0.55 ETH – worth around $130 at the time. The next day, another transaction was sent from the same Ethereum address, carrying yet another $2.6 million transaction fee.

Ethermine processed the second transaction, and, as noted above, all miners who were active in the mining pool at the time will receive a share of the $2.6 fee. The mining pool, which processed the first transaction, Spark Pool, has not yet announced any similar action but said it had begun an investigation into the strange transaction.

BitFly revealed that multiple people had already tried to claim that transaction and its associated fee as their own, but none could provide adequate proof.

“While multiple people claimed being the sender of this transaction none of them was able to produce a valid signature of the sending account. The distribution will be done according to a miner hashrate snapshot,” stated BitFly.

Too Soon for Some?

Ethereum researcher and developer, Vlad Zamfir, expressed disbelief that BitFly would redistribute the funds after just four days. Zamfir wrote:

“Four days!??? We don’t even know at this point if they were hacked or sent the funds themselves.”

BitFly responded by suggesting that $2.6 million worth of Ethereum isn’t the kind of thing someone would simply misplace. The mining company tweeted:

It is sufficient time in our opinion especially as this event got lots on coverage on social & traditional media all around the world. If you are handling accounts in excess of 40,000 ETH you should notice immediately that 20,000 ETH are missing.

— Bitfly (@etherchain_org) June 15, 2020

No mining pool is under any obligation to correct for the errors of Ethereum users – even though methods exist to do so. After a further debate with Twitter observers, BitFly said it would no longer wait four days to process such transactions in the future.

“In order to avoid such discussions in the future, we will be immediately distributing any block reward independent of its size. We are a mining pool and not an arbiter of the ETH network,” BitFly wrote.

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