Too Long; Didn't Read
Last week, crypto-centric forums went abuzz with the discovery of <a href="https://etherscan.io/tx/0x1f73b43dc9c48cc131a931fac7095de9e5eba0c5184ec0c5c5f1f32efa2a6bab" target="_blank">a bizarre Ethereum transaction</a>. The amount sent was normal enough: 0.1 ETH, around 14 dollars at the time. Nothing strange there. What stuck out was the fee: 2100 ETH, or 300,000 US dollars. The network was operating as normal at the time, so the usual gas price (about 2 cents) would have likely gotten the same transaction through. This was a mystery then — one with two possible causes.