How to Transfer $1 Billion for Free: Bitcoin Whale Watching

At just 15 sats/vByte, Bitcoin user demonstrates how cheap it is to send large sums of money over Internet.

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Billionaires, take note. It is a million times cheaper to send huge sums of money on the Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain.

A bitcoin user sent over 50,562 BTC ($1 billion) to an address on the blockchain, paying a fee of only 2,513 satoshis (the smallest denomination of a bitcoin), which equals half a dollar for fun.

Transaction Sankey diagram showing fees, value and time. Source: mempool

Unknown wallet address paid out a tiny fraction (less than 0.0001%) of total transaction value. Simply put, the user paid 50 cents to move double the GDP of the Bitcoin-friendly islands of Tonga. The billion-dollar transaction was processed in block 761374, with a transaction fee of just 15 satoshis (sats) per unit of data or sats/vByte.

Cointelegraph has experimented with various online banking services to estimate the cost of sending large sums of money via legacy funding tools. For the transfer of $10 million, a well-known fund provider charges a tiny fraction, 0.3%, which equals $30,000. It's a million times more expensive than using the Bitcoin blockchain to send money.

Experimenting sending large amounts of money with d old financial tools. Source: Wise

Before a new bitcoin block is mined, every bitcoin transaction request sits in the memory pool, or "memory pool", which is kind of like a bus stop Bitcoin. On average, miners take 10 minutes to mine a new block.

Bitcoin miners sort transactions, processing passengers with the most expensive bus tickets (transaction fee) first. Generally, the higher the transaction fee, the faster the transaction...