Sweeper bots burn $4,800 in Bitcoin fees chasing $12.67

A fee war over a compromised address shows how fast automated bots pounce on weak keys, and how badly the math can go Automated sweeper bots spent about $4,800 in Bitcoin transaction fees in January 2026 to capture $12.67 from a compromised address. The bots fought hard for that prize. The miner, who collected the fees, did considerably better. How a $12.67 prize became a $4,800 bonfire The target was a SegWit address whose private key was effectively public. Whoever set it up used the coinbase transaction ID from Bitcoin block 924,982 as the key. A coinbase transaction is the first transaction in every block, the one that pays the miner. Its ID is visible to anyone who looks at the blockchain. That made the key derivable by anyone running the right script. Any coins sent to the address were claimable by whoever moved first. Two small deposits arrived. The first was 0.00018209 BTC, and the second was 0.00002096 BTC, for a combined total of 0.00020305 BTC. Both were swept within minutes of being sent. The address finished with a zero balance and no remaining unspent outputs, known as UTXOs. The expensive part was the competition. Several bots spotted the same deposits at once, and e...