Issue #557: The competition for blocks is fierce
The bitcoin network is in a race condition
Yesterday around noon, Bitcoin nodes around the world were temporarily split as two competing miners added block 591,848 to the chain tip at the same time. As you can see from the above thread, BitMex Research was hot on the case doing a great job of following the split while educating Twitter users about the nature of chain splits and how they are resolved.
The 0000000000000000001a190874bde466b6443be941e8add217eadce44bd4799f side of the chain eventually won and all our nodes moved over to the winning chain
— BitMEX Research (@BitMEXResearch) August 26, 2019
After a careful manual review of all the transactions in the stale block, we have concluded there were no double spends
— BitMEX Research (@BitMEXResearch) August 26, 2019
The stale block had 8 transactions that never made it into the block that won:
* The Coinbase
* 6 that made it into the next block
* An instance of RBF pic.twitter.com/HiGtcMUTtD
https://t.co/v5FsJR6UEC is trying to automatically implement checks for double spends when stale blocks occur (rather than this manual process)
— BitMEX Research (@BitMEXResearch) August 26, 2019
Please contact us if you think you can help
Yesterday's split resulted in no double-spends and one miner officially losing out on the block reward as other miners decided to build on top of the block mined by the other. Extending the chain tip, causing all of the nodes on the network to coalesce around that chain. Unfortunately for 7 individuals, their transactions which were thought to have had one confirmation turned out to have zero and were then included in the next block. Not really too much of an inconvenience at the end of the day.
This is certainly nothing to fret over as these chain splits are not that uncommon. This is a great moment to reflect and bask in the beautiful glory of consensus via Proof of Work being tested in the wild. Bitcoin works!
Final thought...
Traffic is a terrible thing. Maybe the worst thing.
