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. 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.

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