Paid a hefty 0.7 btc fee! Is there hope for a refund?

Hey everyone, I could really use your advice. I messed up big time. I transferred a part of my bitcoin from one of my wallets to another using Sparrow wallet (they're Taproot addresses, if that matters). But I totally missed the fee amount. I've used Sparrow a bunch of times and the fees were always set automatically within a reasonable range. But this time, something went wrong and I didn't catch it. I ended up paying over 0.7 btc as a fee. I can see the address it was sent to, but I have no clue how to find out who confirmed the transaction or who actually received that fee. Is there any chance I can get it back? Maybe I could send another transaction to the same address with a short OP_RETURN message asking them to get in touch? I was counting on that money to finish my bachelor’s degree. I'd appreciate any suggestions. Thanks a lot!

Give us the tx ID. If the coin was a fee we can not help you. But I think it was your change address not a fee. Which means you may be okay. The only way you can get fee refunds is by talking to the pool that mined that tx. Some pools that mined blocks with fees that are an error have refunded some of the time.

If you're certain it's a fee, only the miner can potentially return it. It would be a gesture of goodwill as they're not obligated to do this because in many jurisdictions there's no clear law for bitcoin transactions and also many miners aren't even legal entities. If you post the TX it helps know who mined the transaction and if they got your BTC as a fee. I've seen many cases of pools returning fees though. It's good publicity for them.

Yeah this has happened more than once.

If it was a change address, I would have it in my wallet. My balance is 0. I have several years of experieence with btc. Just not so much with taproot addresses and Sparrow wallet. TXID e6d33c70fe78022b6d895e81ad0ab84a33eb1023135f45fa0360249900b4059c It says it was fee.

Your transaction https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/transactions/btc/e6d33c70fe78022b6d895e81ad0ab84a33eb1023135f45fa0360249900b4059c It was confirmed in a block mined by Foundry USA mining pool. https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/blocks/btc/860996 Your last hope is contact Foundry USA mining pool and hope that they help you by refund the mistakenly sent fee. Like Antpool did in this following case. https://cryptoslate.com/antpool-to-refund-record-3-1m-bitcoin-transaction-fee-after-costly-user-mistake/ If they support you, you must sign a mesagge from that address to prove you are the true owner.

I will try, thank you very much!

Your transaction was mined by Foundry USA. https://mempool.space/tx/e6d33c70fe78022b6d895e81ad0ab84a33eb1023135f45fa0360249900b4059c?mode=details They are a United States legal entity and I am highly confident they will return your money. Contact them, ideally with a signed message of your address and they will be able to return the BTC. They have social media accounts and a contact form on their site: https://foundrydigital.com/

at op https://foundrydigital.com/mining-service/foundry-usa-pool/ click on contact us. send them an email give them a link to this thread. keep this thread alive  let us know what they say. this is the thread link: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5509073.0 I gave you some merits for following up and being polite.  Good luck I hope foundry says yes to you. Also talk with your wallet ask how that fee happened. https://www.sparrowwallet.com/ it is possible you will be able to help others if sparrow wallet has a bug.

I checked Foundry USA mining pool ever returned wrongly sent fee amount like Ant pool or others but there are no reported such events but they can and it can bring good name for them if they decide to return it but it's beyond our control and OP can only hope he can talk them out of it. If you don't make it then it's gonna be a very costly lesson for you and for everyone its very important to check how much fee you use for every TX as much as you check the recipient twice or thrice.

I got no reply so far. I am trying to find out what happened. Sparrow wallet does not allow to set fee higher than  8,192.00 sats/vB which is 600$ now. https://i.ibb.co/xq41Ccj/Screenshot-from-2024-09-13-21-46-51.png I used Sparrow wallet and it physically does not allow to set that high fee of 0.7 btc. No way I could set it. Could  it potentially be a hack? If so it is odd that the entire change was used  as a fee. Very strange case.

I'll digress a bit from the main topic of the discussion, in this story I was interested in the following point. Bitcoin implies decentralization, but aren't the actions of a mining pool that has the ability to influence the course of events in the BTC-network (returning the cost of inflated transaction fees to the sender. of course, considering that it was from "his own pocket".) some manifestation of "centralization"? I feel sorry to see similar stories, when users mistakenly send large sums of money for fees and I support their desire to return what was lost, this to some extent differs from the idea of ​​BTC-maximalists who reject centralization. Centralization is bad, but also a necessity, isn't it.

Neah, it's not centralization is just an individual making a decision. Foundry can now reimburse that as it would be morally right or take the side of the miners and keep and share the fee, miners are also free to donate their share to the victim or leave the pool altogether if they think the decision is not right. Mining in a pool is more like a commercial contract, it's nothing more really, mining pools gaining shares is more like a form of consensus, the true problem arises when we have just a few pools formed by a few mining farms or companies, but that's a different thing and another problem. Ps, they don't influence the course of events, the fee was paid in a tx and if returned it will be in another tx, the event is set in stone.

It is possible, especially if you are using wind0ws OS that can easily get infected with some malware or keylogger that can change bitcoin addresses. There is also an option you downloaded and installed malicious Sparrow wallet or it was some type of weird bug, but I think there is also a way to manually increase transaction fee. It does sound strange for hackers to send so much money to a miner.

Based on the transactions history of the address you sent the coins to, It seems you are always following some kind of pattern. This is the address you sent the coins to: https://mempool.space/fr/address/bc1qhvppc7apsykmas05aj46xs6ws6qm8h5ytmtg7f I don’t know why but it seems there is a kind of pattern: you usually send exactly 330 sats (which happens to be the dust amount for taproot transactions) to that address and the change goes back to the sending address. Afaik,  it’s not possible to disable the change address in Sparrow. So, you need to do that manually by adding the sending address as an output. Not sure what has gone wrong this time, but if you tell us how you create those transaction (do you use some kind of automated tools?..) then someone may help you figure out what happened. edit: I believe this has something to do with Ordinals.

The pool is usa based 0.7btc is over 40,000 usd. There are laws that do cover mistaken transactions. The op very likely could win a judgement is his to her favor in a court of law. The records are pretty clear. There was no need to send 0.7 btc in fees so it is pretty much a slam dunk that Foundry would lose if it went to court in the USA. Of course the op may live in a different country which could make things more complicated. Foundry would be pretty dumb not to answer the op as he can supposedly prove all of this.

Wait a minute though. you meant to send  $0.20 out of a bitcoin wallet that had almost $48,000 in it? why would someone do something like that?  it seems like what you forgot to include a change address somehow. sparrow wallet must have messed up. people should understand that every time they fire up their bitcoin wallet and do a transaction, there is a risk. what exactly can he prove though? that he made a mistake and didn't notice the fee that it was displaying? and so that means legally they have to refund his bitcoin transaction? i'm all for OP getting back his money but that's really not how bitcoin was meant to be. it is supposed to be irreversible no matter what.

I don't really understand it either, he says he has several years of experience in bitcoin. Unless he was spamming the mempool and didn't say so. Normally the change address is created automatically, at least in the wallets I use. And he had done this type of operation more than once, as khaled0111 says, so I'm more inclined to think it was a hack or an error that made the $600 fee limit disappear.

So OP is one of those who spam dust on the Bitcoin blockchain for financial gain. Now my sympathy suddenly turned into a feeling of sweet justice. I stand corrected:

I don't know how proficient you're with the UTXO transaction model that Bitcoin uses. UTXO is Unspent Transaction Output. You can only spend unspent coins from previous transaction outputs. And an UTXO has to be spent in full, therefore usually the need for a change coin transaction output which returns the excess of spending one or more UTXOs in a transaction. So, if you want to send a part of your coins to another address that belongs to you (or someone else, doesn't matter), you need a second transaction output that sends the rest of your coin minus fee back to a change address of your own wallet. If you somehow deliberately removed that change coin output from your transaction, the rest of your spent coin becomes the transaction fee. Transaction fee equals sum of transaction inputs minus sum of transaction outputs. Agreed. Your transaction input is of high value to you and you don't thoroughly check your transaction details? I must assume you have no idea of the UTXO transaction model. I do use Sparrow wallet occasionally, too. I don't see a reason why Sparrow won't create the transaction in the most common way: one (or multiple) transaction inputs, sum of transaction inputs is sufficiently large to cover the desired amount of coins to send to the target address plus transaction fee, desired amount to be sent to the destination address AND a change coin output returning excess coins back into your own wallet. How could this have gone wrong if you haven't deliberately, maybe unknowingly, interfered or constructed the transaction yourself without knowing all required details? Likely any blockchain explorer will tell you who mined the block where your transaction was confirmed in. Contact Foundry as others told you with a Bitcoin signed message, signed with the private key from your transaction input. You can also prove that you own the transaction output address with another Bitcoin signed message from that private key. Doesn't hurt to prove you control all inputs and outputs of your transaction.