How I Mistakenly Sent $9,500 Eth Transaction Fee For Sending $120

Mistake like this are rare but dangerous most especially if you are a trader or you often deal in cryptocurrency.

An Ethereum user mistakenly paid $9,500 in transaction fees to send just $120. The user, identified by their Reddit moniker ‘Proudbitcoiner’, says the transaction “destroyed my life” and is now desperately asking miners to return the money.

According to a post on Reddit as reported by Bitcoin News, a Reddit user called “Proudbitcoiner” mistakenly typed in the wrong transaction fee, leading to a transfer of amounts nearly 80 times the size intended.

The user, who was swapping tokens on Uniswap via the ethereum wallet Metamask, paid 23.5 ether (ETH), worth roughly $10,300 at the time of writing. ETH fees averaged $1.07 when Proudbitcoiner made the transaction.

The funds were immediately pocketed by mining pool Ethermine, a unit of the crypto miner Bitfly, which by some coincidence created the block containing a transaction with a fee of $2.6 million in June.

According to him

“I thought that this kind of things happen to others, but I was wrong. Ethermine mined the block with this transaction, do I have any options or not? I contacted Ethermine on Twitter, not sure would they help me… https://etherscan.io/tx/0x5641c38bf30fd19ad3332100762017573ee676f35250dcf4a976bb0cfe31ac2f

If you are curious what actually happened… Metamask didn’t populate the “Gas Limit” field with the correct amount in my previous transaction and that transaction failed, so I decided to change it manually in the next transaction (this one), but instead of typing 200000 in “Gas Limit” input field, I wrote it on the “Gas Price” input field, so I payed 200000 GWEI for this transaction and destroyed my life.

The user has contacted Ethermine on twitter but they firm are not obliged to return the money. They even said they are not ready to investigate or return any of such error in the future.