Result of Inexperience or Something Else
This astronomical fee probably resulted from a mistake, but so far, it's unclear if the sender made a mistake or if it was an issue with the network at the time of the transactions. What is known for certain is that the sender opened the crypto wallet shortly before performing the transactions, while the recipient activated their wallet in the second half of October.
The balance on the wallet before the transfer was 139 BTC, and the wallet sent 55 BTC for the cost of 83 BTC in fees. The block accumulated 91.466 BTC in rewards with 6.25 BTC as block subsidy and the remaining 85.216 BTC as a transfer fee. Curiously, an unsuccessful attempt to fork the blockchain at block height 818087 occurred, but the block status changed to “Stale” but was replaced with an identical copy confirming its validity.
Further analysis is necessary to get to the bottom of this situation. Charging hefty fees isn't something Bitcoin owners want to see, especially if they occur due to a glitch in the network. However, at the moment, all data point to an individual error, not a wider issue.
Rising Fees Can Slow Down Future Growth
At the time of writing, Antpool, a Bitcoin mining pool owned by BITMAIN, has not responded with a statement about any possibility to return the overcharged funds. There was a lot of community backlash over F2Pool willingness to refund the overpayment in September.
Most miners believe the onus is on the sender to be careful when setting up a transaction. The network’s protocol allows users to prioritize transactions and manually adjust the amount they are willing to pay a miner to expedite the outgoing transaction to a new valid block.
It's very easy for eager new users to overlook the settings and overpay for a BTC transaction. However, fees continue to grow, and there is a concern that this trend can hamper everyday transactions. The all-time high fee was reached in 2021 with $63 on average per transaction.