it is not money laundering
the fee could go to any block winner.
...
It's highly unlikely in my opinion too that this could've been some scheme of money laundring. You don't launder coins via fees when you can't know or predict which miner with whom you collude collects the large fee.
The transaction
5348f76fab409ed50917e4633d1e66775feb3359448ff4e6b95bf4d81566097e was public and mempool.space says it sat for ~23min in their mempool before it was confirmed. blockchain.info has a unix timestamp of 1734635056 (translates to Thu Dec 19 2024 19:04:16 GMT+0000) when their node got to know about this transaction.
From my personal full node log, the gap between blocks was more than 27min when above transaction was submitted publicly to the network:
Block 875474 was mined at Thu Dec 19 2024 18:59:18 GMT+0000
Block 875475 was mined at Thu Dec 19 2024 19:26:57 GMT+0000 (confirming block of above transaction)
2024-12-19T18:59:18Z Saw new header hash=000000000000000000013bb8ab94de7ae215724c525225ac1a7097494c05f2f8 height=875474
2024-12-19T18:59:18Z Saw new cmpctblock header hash=000000000000000000013bb8ab94de7ae215724c525225ac1a7097494c05f2f8 peer=25873
2024-12-19T18:59:19Z UpdateTip: new best=000000000000000000013bb8ab94de7ae215724c525225ac1a7097494c05f2f8 height=875474 version=0x2854a000 log2_work=95.336238 tx=1133909482 date='2024-12-19T18:59:14Z' progress=1.000000 cache=348.8MiB(2228162txo)
...
2024-12-19T19:26:57Z Saw new header hash=0000000000000000000039848db13649df25e64c877d889a331d569d7e198d76 height=875475
2024-12-19T19:26:58Z UpdateTip: new best=0000000000000000000039848db13649df25e64c877d889a331d569d7e198d76 height=875475 version=0x2530a000 log2_work=95.336252 tx=1133913769 date='2024-12-19T19:27:10Z' progress=1.000000 cache=348.9MiB(2241529txo)
2024-12-19T19:28:54Z Saw new header hash=000000000000000000000abefbb59c35a4de88d99d1711ab05176241330d5f76 height=875476
2024-12-19T19:28:54Z Saw new cmpctblock header hash=000000000000000000000abefbb59c35a4de88d99d1711ab05176241330d5f76 peer=25873
2024-12-19T19:28:54Z UpdateTip: new best=000000000000000000000abefbb59c35a4de88d99d1711ab05176241330d5f76 height=875476 version=0x2e000000 log2_work=95.336265 tx=1133917277 date='2024-12-19T19:28:52Z' progress=1.000000 cache=348.9MiB(2247812txo)
This strange OP_RETURN data in the transaction's outputs caught my eye and I was wondering what this could be.
I'd rather be interested if it was some "funny" glitch of Ledger crap and their shitty Ledger Live or whatever else was involved.
Not that one needs another reason to stay away from the Ledger shit... I hope more solid evidence or proof of this will surface and be published.
