Yesterday, someone sent bitcoin (BTC) to a compromised wallet that used the transaction identifier (txid) of a coinbase block reward as a private key. Incredibly, the txid of the coinbase of block 924,982 is the private key of a wallet.

A bot feeding frenzy commenced.

“I’d really like to know why that happens,” wrote an observer. “Some people have said they throw little amounts occasionally to see the bots fighting, but why the bigger amounts?”

In this context, “bots fighting” refers to computer programs connected to a memory pool (mempool) of pending BTC transactions.

Automatically sensing a deposit into a compromised wallet, bots will immediately broadcast replace by fee (RBF) transactions to outbid one another’s fees to miners for a withdrawal transaction.

The spectacle of watching greedy bots broadcast a stream of increasingly aggressive RBF transactions has some entertainment value.

...read more at protos.com