"Lost" Blocks? | Bitcointalksearch.org

theymos

administrator

Activity: 5166

Merit: 12850

Quote from: LobsterMan on December 16, 2010, 06:37:59 PM

EDIT: Nevermind I guess I spoke too soon. For some reason the generation didn't register in my client until an additional block was generated, so it showed up at 2/unconfirmed Grin

New blocks are delayed for a block before they show up in the UI to stop users from getting their hopes up about a failed block.

LobsterMan

member

Activity: 73

Merit: 10

EDIT: Nevermind I guess I spoke too soon. For some reason the generation didn't register in my client until an additional block was generated, so it showed up at 2/unconfirmed Grin

MoonShadow

legendary

Activity: 1708

Merit: 1007

Quote from: LobsterMan on December 16, 2010, 06:21:36 PM

I just had a miner seemingly drop a block on the live network and this is pretty aggravating considering that I only generate a block maybe once a week....is there anything that can be done about this?

No. The most likely explaination is that your generator developed a block and shipped it out to the network, but someone else also generated a valid block slightly quicker. Whichever of the blocks spreads out first is more likely to grab the majority of the network nodes, and then then next block is more likely to be generated based on it instead of your's. This is how the network chooses between ties. Someone else has posted that roughly 3% of generated blocks get rejected by the network due to this effect, but I can't verify that.

LobsterMan

member

Activity: 73

Merit: 10

I just had a miner seemingly drop a block on the live network and this is pretty aggravating considering that I only generate a block maybe once a week....is there anything that can be done about this?

BitLex

hero member

Activity: 532

Merit: 505

just my experience using m0mchil's pre-builds on default settings,
first time noticed October 30, til now an average of 10% "poofed".

the network, the miner, the client, whatever it is, that's what i get and i take it (there's nothing I could do anyway).

ByteCoin

sr. member

Activity: 416

Merit: 277

Artforz data indicates that he sees 0.2% of his blocks "go missing". Our guess is that satoshi saw this happening and fixed the UI to hide the problem but overestimated the frequency of occurrence. 10% block loss implies a propagation delay of the order of tens of seconds which seems rather high.

I requested that miners look for lost blocks and share their data in
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.22508

ByteCoin

LobsterMan

member

Activity: 73

Merit: 10

(crosspost from m0m's miner thread...but some of the replies there lead me to believe that this may be something that happens on the real network too...)

I made a bit of a discovery when testing m0m's latest binaries in -testnet, look at the times when blocks are generated in the miners, and note that they don't all show up in bitcoin's UI:

There seems to sometimes be a delay of 1 or more minutes between when they show up in the miner and when bitcoin picks up the transaction, if it picks it up at all.
Is this something to worry about, or just a peculiarity of testnet?

Other people have said that they "lose" about 10% of the blocks that they generate, which to me seems unacceptable if it takes possibly multiple days to generate a block....is there any merit to these claims?

Topic: "Lost" Blocks? (Read 1453 times)