Users on X voted for the funds to be distributed among other miners, but the miner responsible opted to return the funds to Paxos.
Speculation swirled on X earlier this week when eagle-eyed users spotted that one unfortunate wallet address overpaid $512,000 on a single $2000 Bitcoin (BTC) transaction.
Many assumed the overspender was PayPal, due to its association with a now inactive wallet address, but it turned out to be crypto infrastructure provider, Paxos. (The mistake wasn’t far off: Paxos is the custody manager of many of PayPal’s crypto services, and it issues their new stablecoin, PYUSD.)
Read more: Paxos confirms it mistakenly paid $512K on $2K Bitcoin transaction, here’s how that happened
Paxos said that the error can be traced back to a bug on a single transfer, which has now been fixed.
Bitcoin mining pool, mempool, confirmed today that the funds have been returned from the miner back to Paxos.
Just yesterday, the miner who received the fees tweeted they were “annoyed and regretted agreeing to refund that 20 BTC”, particularly when they saw the person claiming the fee “kept saying” EST instead of EDT/UTC.
“Last time a Zcash guy did that, I blocked his entire company,” the miner added.
The miner, known as Satofishi on X, conducted a poll asking their followers to vote on what they think should happen to the funds. 35% of the 4811 voters said that the funds should be distributed among miners.
28% voted to refund it to Paxos “as is”, with “going fifty-fifty” being the most unpopular option.
The poll raised some serious questions about the decentralised nature of Bitcoin. Others commented that returning the funds is “noble”, yet it sets the “wrong precedent”, asking why the same theory shouldn’t apply to someone else who accidentally overpays $100 in transaction fees.
“PayPal gotta learn about the finality of crypto,” wrote pseudonymous X user CryptoParadyme.
The miner initially offered the overspender to claim the funds within three days, stating they would redistribute the funds to miners if left unclaimed.
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