That transaction appears to have an image attached: https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/transactions/btc/2fc565c... (see Ordinals Inscription)

Wow they spent $5k to put some incredibly ugly AI generated art on the blockchain. Money well spent.

But it's on a halving block, so whoever did it has bragging rights in a way. In twenty years they can point to it and say "I did that." I fear that ordinal inscriptions will start making the blockchain unwieldy, but I'm not educated enough to know if the mining cost of adding them is a good enough defense against such spam on the bitcoin chain.

Bargain compared to some stuff: https://blockgeeks.com/5-most-expensive-bored-ape-yacht-club...

Some people pay a lot of money for paper bills with interesting serial numbers, far above the bill's denomination. This is no different.

The amount of the fee is kind of up to the sender. If the fee is not high enough, miners will not include the transaction in the blocks. But there's no upper limit on how high the sender can set the fee.

Edit: Since a block has a limited amount of space for transactions, transactions with more bytes have to pay a larger fee to get picked up by miners. This one looks really large.

40btc or $2.5mm looks like 5x - 10x "current normal". 2800 txn/block and $10-$20 average fee over the last week.

https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f...

Bitcoin Average Transaction Fee is at a current level of 16.50, down from 19.38 yesterday and up from 2.046 one year ago. This is a change of -14.88% from yesterday and 706.6% from one year ago.

Oh you meant for the whole block?

40? I'm seeing 0.08.

It was a dummy transaction to begin with, they just wanted into this specific block.

When you make a transaction on the Bitcoin network (and really every other cryptocurrency), you tack on a fee to the amount of coin you want to send. Miners prioritize higher fee transactions when deciding which transactions to include in the next block. Therefore, to guarantee your inclusion in the next block, you would choose to increase the fee you pay.

So, for this transaction, they chose to pay a $5000 fee to guarantee their placement in this block.

This was a historic event people paid to be a part of.

Only 4MB of data can fit in a block. To get priority for your transaction you pay more.

New protocol launch coincided with this block - in chasing becoming the first use of the protocol, users spent thousands to use it or create an asset via the protocol.