An anonymous user has fallen victim of an expensive Bitcoin transaction error by paying over 2.66038352 BTC estimated to be worth 47,000 USD dollars to unknown bitcoin wallet 

The unknown transaction hash is 3ba0c9eaf3185898164518cda7e3433d1d2049188d737f2b2a7e188aaeb8b4de and the identity of the receiver still remains a mystery.

This is supposedly by accident resulting from the user setting the Bitcoin file transaction manually. There was even more costly error this past June where someone dropped $2.6 million in fees to give $130 to ETH. This was an incidence that has never happened before. It was the largest transaction fee ever charged for Ethereum to be transferred.

Cryptocurrency transactions are permanent and cannot be cancelled or reversed. One will have to email a receiver to request a refund if they end up giving the funds to the wrong person. There is nothing that can be done to recover the funds if they do not know who the address belongs to.

As of February 2019, as someone spent $ 450K on fees (the anonymous sender later worked on the bug with Sparkpool, the mining pool to which they sent the fee), he was a former Ethereum Registry nominee for this contract.

The blockchain explorer Blockstream indicated that it might have been a self-transfer because there was no shift from the Bitcoin transaction.

Declining Bitcoin Fees

Bitcoin transactions averagely cost fee of only 0.00025 BTC, or $4.45, according to Bitinfocharts. That is down in October from over $13 (a peak for the year). A crypto wallet (whale) in late October, moved over $1 billion worth of BTC from Bitcoin wallet supplier Xapo to an anonymous address and the transfer fee payable was just $3.

Source: Bitinfocharts

In reality, there has been a decline in Bitcoin fees since reaching at the peak in $13.157. Wayne Chen, the founder of Coincurve says that the fall in transaction fees is connected to the normalized transaction operation and recent adjustment of mining difficulty, which occurs about every two weeks.