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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

While I don't doubt it's a method used for money laundering, this particular instance probably isn't it. For one, if you're money laundering, you don't want the transaction to show up on the front page of HN.

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Yeah why not do this over time with smaller fees. With the ridiculous gas these days you might be able to sneak quite a few tx in under the guise of “nft bots” but not 7500 eth in one tx

What's another explanation for this huge fee? Your reasoning makes sense, but that still leaves me extremely curious.

Its not money laundering, lol. a) Bitfinex is an exchange, they don't need to launder. They are the laundry! b) You usually want to get the money back when your launder. This is handing 20 million dollars to a random on the street who takes your transactions.

I get that point, but I was asking for what is then the real reason. The only two I've seen proposed are money laundering (perhaps by collusion with the miner) or mistake (accidentally confusing the transaction amount with the tip - still meaning the intention was to pay $100k in transaction fees).

If i was to bet, my money is on a catastrophic fuck up. Its probably 'other peoples money' too. Some VC maybe lost a big bag of ether.

> This is handing 20 million dollars to a random on the street who takes your transactions.

Yes I'm sure it's purely coincidence that the "random on the street" who mined this block is a major Bitfinex shareholder.

Using a client which has two boxes, one for fee and one for value transferred.

("Fat finger" errors like this are not unheard of in the read financial system, but that usually allows reversal)

That still means they intended to pay $100K in transaction fees, is that a normal sum?

Various claims on reddit using phrases like "set the gwei limit the same as the gas limit" and "new EIP 1559 transaction", which I can barely make sense of, but it sounds like they may have been in entirely different units?

Anyway, be your own bank, I'm sure you can figure this out. /s

It's a huge number but amounts to 0.4% (0.004). I have no idea how that compares to regular 24M international wire transfers, though.

The base gas fee for the block is:

Base Fee Per Gas: 0.000000058907049227 Ether (58.907049227 Gwei)

The paid gas fee for the transaction is: 0.053243669870735422 Ether (53,243,669.870735422 Gwei)

Perhaps they wanted to post the transaction for 53 Gwei but fatfingered it? Or entered Pwei instead.

Edit: This block was apparently mined by poolin pool: https://minerstat.com/coin/POOLIN-ETH

Their rewards almost doubled

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