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Bitcoin => Development & Technical Discussion => Topic started by: marcus_of_augustus on June 03, 2011, 04:40:54 AM



Title: Orphanned block data?
Post by: marcus_of_augustus on June 03, 2011, 04:40:54 AM

Anybody got a database or similar of orphan blocks?

How often are they occurring, (have they occurred)?

Time to solve for following blocks, chain reorganisations, etc?


Title: Re: Orphanned block data?
Post by: kjj on June 03, 2011, 08:01:32 AM
I haven't seen anything browsable, but they do happen, and they are generally resolved within 1 or 2 blocks.


Title: Re: Orphanned block data?
Post by: marcus_of_augustus on June 03, 2011, 08:06:31 AM
I haven't seen anything browsable, but they do happen, and they are generally resolved within 1 or 2 blocks.

So is there no record kept of them?

The debug.log prints a "REORGANIZED" message for the nodes that were working on the orphaned chain, correct?

Are these the same as the "Invalid" blocks that the pools sometimes report?


Title: Re: Orphanned block data?
Post by: theymos on June 03, 2011, 08:40:24 AM
They're stored in your block database forever. You'll see them along with the other blocks if you use -printblock or -printblocktree.


Title: Re: Orphanned block data?
Post by: marcus_of_augustus on June 03, 2011, 09:00:53 AM
They're stored in your block database forever. You'll see them along with the other blocks if you use -printblock or -printblocktree.

Okay thanks. And that will then be all orphans that occurred network wide, not just local ones.

Hoping there might already be something like block explorer to analyse them. I'd like to get timestamps out of them and the blocks occurring before and after orphans.


Title: Re: Orphanned block data?
Post by: theymos on June 03, 2011, 09:09:23 AM
Okay thanks. And that will then be all orphans that occurred network wide, not just local ones.

No, it's just local ones. There's no way to get all network-wide orphan blocks. Some might only spread to a few dozen peers.


Title: Re: Orphanned block data?
Post by: marcus_of_augustus on June 03, 2011, 09:18:57 AM
Okay thanks. And that will then be all orphans that occurred network wide, not just local ones.

No, it's just local ones. There's no way to get all network-wide orphan blocks. Some might only spread to a few dozen peers.

Interesting, so there is no one true block chain, except for the core. They are distinguishable by their orphans.

Is it possible to "combine" two different block chain data sets, i.e. have the orphans (and other diff. data) added to a new chain containing both sets of information?


Title: Re: Orphanned block data?
Post by: theymos on June 03, 2011, 09:21:58 AM
It's possible. There's no tool to do it, though.