MARA Pool Mines Bitcoin Block With 1 BTC Fee Paid on $10 Transaction

A bitcoin user appears to have mistakenly paid nearly 1 BTC in fees worth $105,000 to send a transaction worth only about $10, one of the most overpaid transactions in almost a year.

The transaction was included in block 923023, mined by MARA’s proprietary mining pool, with a total block reward of 4.154 BTC — far above the standard 3.125 BTC subsidy plus typical fees. The sender attached 99,989,964 satoshis (about 0.9999 BTC) to transfer just 0.00010036 BTC, or $10 worth.

According to Mempool.space estimates, the transaction was overpaid by around 226,000 times the required rate under current network conditions, which are at historic lows. It would normally cost a user to pay less than $0.6, even for high-priority transactions, at the moment.

Bitcoin’s average transaction fees are currently making up only about 0.6% of total block rewards. That means miners are earning the vast majority of their revenue from newly issued bitcoin rather than network fees — a sign of subdued on-chain activity.

It remains unclear whether MARA Pool intends to return the excessive fee, given its status as a private and proprietary pool, unlike previous incidents where similar transactions were mined and refunded eventually by public pools like Foundry USA Pool or Antpool.