From "Noble Chain" Back to "Cabbage Price": Recalling Crypto History Triggered by Mining Fees
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From "Noble Chain" Back to "Cabbage Price": Recalling Crypto History Triggered by Mining Fees
The absurd yet true stories of gas fees.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Huang Shiliang
Recently, miner fees on both Bitcoin and Ethereum networks have hit record lows.
Not long ago, these two blockchains were nicknamed "noble chains" due to their high transaction costs—the most expensive places in the entire industry for user fees. But over recent months, Bitcoin's miner fee has essentially returned to its historical low of 1 sat/vbyte, while Ethereum's gas fee has dropped to just fractions of a Gwei.
It’s time for some nostalgia—sharing a few wild yet true stories about Bitcoin miner fees.
Exchange withdrawal fees once went through the roof
Around 2017, I personally experienced a "crisis" caused by miner fees.
I was preparing to withdraw some Bitcoin from an exchange. After submitting the request, I noticed the transaction wasn't being confirmed on-chain. Checking the details via a blockchain explorer, I found it included a huge number of very small UTXOs (unspent transaction outputs) as inputs.
The size of a transaction (in bytes) depends on the number of its inputs and outputs. The more inputs, the larger the transaction, and thus the higher the miner fee required.
However, at that time, this particular exchange used a fixed withdrawal fee strategy and did not dynamically adjust fees based on the actual transaction size. As a result, my transaction was severely underpriced. Miners are profit-driven—they ignored my transaction entirely, leaving it stuck across the network.
Based on the network congestion level and the massive size of the transaction, the actual required fee amounted to over 0.5 BTC—a huge sum even by today's standards.
A brief technical explanation:
Imagine news reports where a bus company delivers several trucks full of coins to a bank, requiring dozens of staff and days to count. The labor and operational cost could exceed the total value of the coins received.
Similarly, consolidating many fragmented UTXOs into one large fund on the Bitcoin network incurs substantial miner fees.
I contacted customer support, hoping they could help accelerate the transaction, but only got standard replies like “This is how blockchain works; please wait patiently.” They were just dodging responsibility.
I traced back the origin of this transaction. By analyzing on-chain data, I pieced together a shocking conclusion: the exchange’s hot wallet system had likely suffered a "dusting attack."
An attacker had continuously sent thousands of tiny Bitcoin amounts (e.g., UTXOs slightly above the dust threshold of 546 satoshis) to the exchange's deposit addresses over time.
When ordinary users initiated withdrawals, the exchange’s wallet system automatically selected these fragmented UTXOs as inputs, creating bloated transactions. Since the fee was fixed, these withdrawal transactions became stuck.
I suspect this might have been a form of malicious competition within the industry back then.
In fact, such offchain wallet-based attacks targeting UTXO bloat were quite common in the early days. Today, exchanges have implemented technical defenses against them—for example, disallowing direct deposits from mining rewards to exchange wallets. Modern exchange withdrawal systems now also support dynamic fee adjustment based on transaction size.
Ultimately, needing the funds urgently, I had to pay out of pocket, contacting a mining pool directly and paying a hefty fee to get my transaction "rescued." Looking back, that was way too much money—damn it.
"Kindness culture" and clever covert strategies
The Bitcoin mining pool community has an unwritten "kindness culture": when a block includes a transaction with an abnormally high fee, most mining pools tend to return this unexpected windfall to the sender.
This has happened repeatedly throughout crypto history. One of the earliest cases I recall dates back to around 2013, when the famous "FriedCat" mining pool returned a massive erroneous fee to a user.
Since then, similar stories seem to surface almost every year. Instead of treating the extra fee as profit, pools proactively contact the mistaken sender and return the funds.
In a world where crypto often values money over people, the Bitcoin mining community remains surprisingly kind.
However, this seemingly altruistic practice can be exploited for sophisticated purposes—such as a clever coin mixing strategy.
A Bitcoin transaction's miner fee equals total inputs minus total outputs. This fee becomes part of the block reward, included in the Coinbase transaction—the first transaction in any block. A Coinbase transaction has no regular inputs; it's created "out of thin air" by miners to claim their reward. This means that once funds enter the Coinbase transaction via miner fees, all previous ownership history is severed.
Suppose you hold BTC in an address flagged by authorities as "tainted." How do you launder it? You can craft a special transaction: input 1 BTC from the tainted address, but set the output to receive only 0.001 BTC. The difference—0.999 BTC—becomes the miner fee. Once a mining pool includes this transaction in a block, the 0.999 BTC merges into their Coinbase reward, completely erasing its past trail.
Then, simply contact the mining pool, negotiate a commission, and have them send the "clean" reward to your new designated address. The process is seamless—a masterful money laundering operation.
Historical extremes: transactions that defy belief
Looking back at Bitcoin’s history, certain extreme transactions remain legendary:
Highest miner fee ever: On December 12, 2011, transaction txid:1d7749c65c90c32f5e2c036217a2574f3f4403da39174626b246eefa620b58d9 made history. It sent out 207 BTC, but the recipient received only 35.77 BTC. A staggering 171.79869184 BTC was paid as miner fees. At current prices, that fee would be worth nearly twenty million dollars.
The most frugal whale in history: In stark contrast, there was a remarkable transaction that transferred over 500,000 BTC with zero miner fee: txid:044e32f5e01d70333fb84b744cb936bf49acab518282c111894b18bcf3a63c12.
This ultra-wealthy holder truly didn’t spare a single satoshi.
There are so many fascinating stories in crypto—too bad the coins are mostly gone, leaving only tales behind.
Tomorrow I’ll recap some ETH versions of gas fee stories.
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