Database of orphan blocks

[jl2012]

AFAIK there are 2 open databases of orphan blocks, https://www.biteasy.com/ and https://blockchain.info/ . However, they don't have data before 2014. Also, it seems blockchain.info reports more orphan blocks than biteasy.com but I haven't matched the results.

I wonder if anyone is keeping a database of all orphan blocks. I know it is not easy to define "orphan blocks" because it is trivial to fork the chain when the difficulty was low.

I'm particularly interested in those "buggy forks", e.g. the negative value output in 2010 and the v0.8 fork in 2013, and forks with double spending. (I thought there was also a fork related to P2SH in 2012 but I'm not sure. I learnt bitcoin after BIP16 was done)

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[Amph]

aren't orphan block stored in the blkxxxx.dat file? with -printblocktree you should be able to print those in the debug log

[jl2012]

aren't orphan block stored in the blkxxxx.dat file? with -printblocktree you should be able to print those in the debug log

printblocktree is no longer available in 0.10

I suppose unless my node was online when the orphan block was created, I won't have a copy of it as nodes will only forward the best chain

[domob]

aren't orphan block stored in the blkxxxx.dat file? with -printblocktree you should be able to print those in the debug log

printblocktree is no longer available in 0.10

You can use the "getchaintips" RPC call instead.

I suppose unless my node was online when the orphan block was created, I won't have a copy of it as nodes will only forward the best chain

This, however, is true of course.  You will only be able to see blocks that your node has seen on the network.

[gmaxwell]

Old forks must be obtained from a source you trust-- just just to be honest but to have competently curated their collection; with low difficulty its now easy for someone to forge a circa 2011 or circa 2012 fork; and various people have spammed the network with faux old blocks in the past.  If you actually care about the integrity of whatever you're looking at you should want to be sure that whatever process collected the blocks can actually attest to their timeliness.

There were many short forks (e.g. 3-5 blocks) related to p2sh, but no one with an updated node would have recorded them; since they were rejected right out.  Being online is not sufficient, you had to have accepted the block before you would have committed it to disk so if you never thought the now-extinct branch was best (which requires validity), you wouldn't have it.

Getchaintips is the right way to explore forks with current software.