A block that is part of an alternative branch in the blockchain and doesn't belong to the longest chain. Stale blocks occur when the blockchain forks, but another competing block at the same height ends up parenting the new longest chain.
Questions tagged [stale-block]
43 questions
55
votes
2 answers
What is the longest blockchain fork that has been orphaned to date?
The orphaned blocks view from BlockChain.info shows a recent fork of the blockchain (starting with block 173,928) that went four blocks long before being orphaned.
Other than the controlled rewind following the Value Overflow bug in August 2010 in…
Stephen Gornick
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What are orphaned and stale blocks?
If I understand it right, a stale block is a block for which an earlier confirmation has been found and was accepted by majority of people. This block is considered invalid and is later never used.
But what is a orphaned block. How is it created?…
Salvador Dali
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How often forks occur?
How often do forks occur in the block chain? I'm interested in the small, one block forks that happen when two miners create a block at the similar time.
ThePiachu
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Obtaining historical orphaned blocks (chaintips) without old node
I'm attempting to do some research surrounding orphaned blocks within the Bitcoin network. From my understanding the best and really only way to obtain data for blocks that no longer exist in the main chain/branch (including orphaned blocks) is to…
KappaDev
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What are the consequences of high orphan block rate?
I know the disadvantages of a high stale block rate include:
More opportunities for double spend attacks
Lower network difficulty making the network cheaper to attack
But I don't know how even an orphan block could affect the network
mengeroshi
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4
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How often does temporary fork occur and how long does it last?
I was wondering, how often does temporary forks occur? They appear when there are two different blocks mined based on the same previous block (parent block), but what are chances for that? And if fork occurs, how long does it last (on average)? What…
ddavi031
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What happen if some blocks are added simultaneously with same previous hash
In all of the blockchain samples that I see
e.g.
adilmoujahid,
Savjee
as I checked, they added previous Hash by creating a block.
Suppose that, L is the current last block in a chain. Block A and B are created at the same time. So they set their…
masoud2011
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When does a miner exactly start to create a block?
As far as I know, a miner begins creating a new block as soon as it receives a valid block from another miner. It then begins to construct and hash the next block on top of the block it just received.
However, in case of existence of orphan blocks,…
Önder Gürcan
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4
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Does local blockchain database (blkXXXXX.dat) contain abandoned forks forever?
When my node realizes that the given block needs to be abandoned - does it leave it in the database or replace the block with a valid one? And if "invalid" block remains: is it somehow marked as invalid? If I meet two blocks with the same parent in…
ardabro
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What is a stale blockchain tip? Is it a blockchain tip missing the latest mined block?
Stale blocks and orphaned blocks are defined here.
What is a stale blockchain tip? Is it a blockchain tip missing the latest mined block? Or is it a blockchain with a stale block (as defined in that post) at its tip?
This question was asked during…
Michael Folkson
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Are stale blocks retained forever or are they "pruned" automatically at some depth in the chain?
In theory the chain could be re-mined from a stale block, and their existence seems superfluous and just use up data storage, are they automatically pruned after x height, and if so where in the code does this happen?
Scalextrix
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Is there a visualisation tool for discarded block chains in Bitcoin?
A lot of papers about cryptocurrencies explain the concept of the "longest chain", which goes along with these kind of figures:
I was wondering if there exist any kind of visualisation tool for these kind of discarded block chains within Bitcoin…
user1226868
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How is over-spending one block apart prevented?
So, let's say you have a wallet with 20BTC, and you have a flow like so:
You send 15BTC to A in block 1
You send 15BTC to B in block 2
What happens if at block 1 there are two chains across miners. In chain X the transaction is there, in chain Y,…
Earlz
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Is there evidence for lack of stale blocks?
There was a recently published academic paper "Bitcoin’s limited adoption problem" which used a statistic that the network latency is around 15 seconds.
Obviously, this is not true: One can provide a quick argument with Poisson distributions and…
MicahW
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3
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Removing stale blocks using prune=1TB
I'm running a block parser that reads blocks/*.dat and I've noticed it dumps the stale blocks as well as the main chain blocks. My project only needs the main chain blocks, and I noticed that Core's pruned option removes stale blocks as part of its…
Steve
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