Transaction Fee without Transaction

Question

Today I wanted to buy me a cryptokittie. Because I wanted to buy the cat, I downloaded Metamask and put some Ether in it.

My transaction to buy some kittes were not realized at the end, but still I had to pay a fee.

(I put the information out of ethereumscan at the end of this mail)

My question now is: is it normal that I have to pay a fee (gas) even if the transaction never was done? For what am I paying? Who gets the money I paid?

What does the error code "out of gas" means?

0x92c0e9ee27f9a3541480fd21290727d143bd4485bc75311d32db9947b2cb68a6

4886613

1 hr 14 mins ago

0x532d9907702385bfc78b26950a530a744939e572

OUT

CryptoKittiesSalesAuction

0.005 Ether

0.0015

Answer 1

- is it normal that I have to pay a fee (gas) even if the transaction never was done?

Yes. The transaction needs gas to be executed. But for security reason, you need to set a gas limit (to avoid infinite loops in code). In your case, you put 30000 as a gas limit, but your transaction certainly needs way more than 30000 (actually, a very basic ether transfer needs at least 21000). As a consequence, your tx failed, but someone used some computing power to establish that, so you have to pay this someone anyway for his work.

• For what am I paying? Who gets the money I paid?

You pay the miner for his computing power allocated to process your transaction

- What does the error code "out of gas" means?

As explained above, you put your gas limit too low, so your transaction ran out of gas to complete.

A note: Please, for god sake, do at least some research before using a tool. You can find all this information in ethereum yellow/white papers and in other post on stack exchange ;)