That’s not what this person is saying. What they’re saying is that the miner (in this case the same person as the sender) signed a transaction with an insane fee and kept it private. The miner then solved a block. Finally, the miner then includes their transaction in the block because they’re allowed to pick what transactions to include. This would only happen for a “memey” reason because the miner is technically losing out on a transactions worth of fees but it does generate headlines like this which I would say would be worth $1-3.
Not likely what happened in this case but theoretically possible with the technology.
To be clear, it's not that someone asked for this fee. You put fees on a transaction to incentivize miners to include your transaction in the next block. So I don't think there was a scam here.
In this case it's probably not a fat-finger and more likely to be a software bug. The popular clients have warnings against against absurd fees, and even if you're crafting your own transactions (which might lead to absurdly high fees if you don't neglected to have "change" outputs), bitcoin core will check for this when you're trying to broadcast the transaction[1].
For sure this was due to some bug in the software, since must be some exchange creating the transactions manually and for some reason the change address was not set so the blockchain assumed the remaining was all blockchain fees (just a supposition).
Also, imagine having so much time to spare you create an entire website to hate on Web3.
Avoid Euronet everywhere in Europe, just find a bank or credit union with an ATM, they will charge you no or very little fees usually, unfortunately Euronet have a lot of ATMs at airports and in tourist hotspots but their fees and conversion rates are very bad.
I've no experience with crypto but a lot with UI. Is it possible that they were trying to send 500K for 1865 and entered the numbers in the wrong inputs ? Software asked them to confirm. They saw the correct digits and pressed ok.
IIRC, bitcoin transactions are structured to always send the entire wallet balance every time, and the way to avoid doing that is to send almost all of the money back to the current wallet address in a self loop. Then, any money that isn't listed with a destination becomes the miner fee.
So they may have just forgotten to add the field that sends the money in a self-loop, and by default the account was drained by the miner fee.
This is obviously a terrible design but it can't be changed.
You'd have to ensure that miner can score a block in a reasonable time. That would be a lot of hassle with a setup likely worth over 500k. Not impossible, but really unlikely.
I'd think an insider could keep a transaction hanging at any given time in many accounts payable situations, but taking all that risk to share a tiny portion of a pool would be pretty silly..
The miner signs a tx with that insane fee, but intentionally doesn't broadcast it (so nobody can include that tx but themselves).
When he finds a block, that tx is included and he's basically paying himself.
It's mostly done for the memes.