why are mining fees not refunded
why are mining fees not refunded
I made a transaction about four days ago, I used 10. sat/vbyte but since then the transaction have been without confirmation so yesterday I decided to cancel the transaction hoping that the principal amount I wanted to send out and the mining fee will be returned together but to my surprise the mining fee was not refunded even when the transaction was not mined because there was no confirmation.
Why was the transaction fee not refunded?
In addition to what Charles-Tim said, the transaction fees act as a form of payment for the block space your transaction occupies on the Bitcoin blockchain. so saying your transaction fees should be refunded means you are indirectly saying that every node should purge your transaction from the block chain. And that would have been possible if you had made use of a fee below 6sat/byte. Probably only the node network of the wallet you used would have broadcasted it while other node will simply just purge it because of the extremely low fees.
If you cancel a bitcoin transaction, not that you actually cancel it. You only increase the fee so that the coin can be sent with higher fee to another of your wallet address.
Next time, just use pump fee/increase the fee instead if you are still willing to send the coin to the receiving address.