Bitcoin Forum

 Ive been mining litecoins and i think something is wrong. ive found 6 blocks and got the 50 coins from the first 4 blocks but nothing from the last 2. it seems unlikely that someone would solve my the same block just before me twice. thinking this might be a mistake i did a -rescan, a -resync, re-downloaded the whole blockchain and still i only see 4 transaction out of the 6 there should be. Maybe i'm wrong though and this is normal. I only started solo mining with litcoin recently, before this i just mined in a pool for bitcoins. below are pictures of my client's overview showing 6 transactions, and the transactions tab showing only 4. can someone shed some light on this? am i really missing coins that i should have, and what should i do?

http://i46.tinypic.com/15wxzep.png
http://i49.tinypic.com/2jb8lxt.png

First of all, this topic belongs in the Alternative Cryptocurrencies section. You can move it yourself using the link at the bottom of the page.

Secondly, it is not unheard of at all for a block to be orphan, usually because someone found it at the same time or just a few seconds before you did.

thanks for the quick reply. i heard of blocks being orphaned but i thought it was kinda rare. since it happened twice in a row i thought i was a mistake.  so its not a mistake - just bad luck?

sad but true :)

though a couple of factors that can hinder you are
your upload speed, if you are on a home connection and say a pool in a data centre with a fat pipe find a block at similar times the pools block can propagate across the network quicker and thus be accepted faster.
and as we have been finding with Bitcoin recently, if you are creating large blocks (with lots of transactions) the block takes longer to upload and verify for the other nodes, again slowing propagation across the network.
Note, orphans are rare and these situations only arise when 2 blocks at the same height are found very close together :)

thanks for the detailed response. so if i understand you correctly, getting 2 orphan blocks is really rare, but more likely in my scenario?

also i am on a home connection ~10mbps. i guess the pools have higher bandwidth and thus a better chance of getting a block into the chain before i do, so im at a disadvantage mining solo. well i guess thats ok, ill just go back to mining as usual as see how things go.

well orphans are rare, as we understand we are looking for a needle in a haystack the chances of 2 needles being found in 2 separate haystacks pretty much simultaneously is rare :)
as an example for Bitcoin there is a 7% chance of 2 blocks being found within a minute (I haven't checked the LTC stats on this)
It is only at these rare times you are at a this disadvantage.
Hope that is a help
Graet

that has been helpfull. thank you.

update: i went back to mining and found 4 more blocks, and 2 were orphaned. i think im might be done with litecoins if i'm getting this many orphaned blocks
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/406/410e.png/

2nd update: mining at litecoinpool.org now. seems like a better option to pool mine than risk losing rewards of 50 ltc.