- The transaction sender set both the max total fee and the max priority fee to above 10 million. Most UIs require at least two manual setting changes to do this.
- The sender is Bitfinex -- they're pros and not just a mon and pop.
Maybe it could just be a transfer from the sender to whoever the miner is...
Take a typical $23 transaction fee, which comes out to ~0.00775756 ETH
Of course, everyone knows you don't want to do math as floating point, you want to use an integer representation. 1 ETH can be divided into 1e18 "Wei" or 1e9 "GigaWei".
So that 23 USD could be expressed an an integer "7757560", with the expectation that the decimal point would get moved 9 points <- thataway to become 0.00775756 ETH
If somewhere in your code you do some kind of money formatting that turns 7757560 GWEI into 7757.56 ETH, you've got your $23,000,000 USD mining fee.
The software that interacts with it does.
For instance, Numpy provides array-language [1] capabilities to Python, but because it isn't a first-class element in the language Python is not thought of as an array language, and using it as one would be a bit clunky.
How are rationals used to represent decimals?
Decimals are just the subset of rationals where the denominator is always a power of 10, so the representation and arithmetic operations are simple if you already have rational support (though if you need to preserve decimal results, you need approximation logic for division, since dividing two rationals with denominators that are powers of 10 may result in a rational with a denominator that is not a power of 10.)
This is also true for adding, subtracting, and multiplying, though in those cases it is always trivial to convert the result into a form where the denominator is a power of 10.
So instead of a bug in converting gwei to eth, I bet somebody thought they were specifying the raw price in wei but the input box assumes gwei and does a x1000000000.
How could they know who the miner was going to be before the block was mined?