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What happens in the bitcoin network when two miners solve a block at the same time?
Answer:
When such occurs it means that the block with most mining difficulty or the longest will be chose while the other will be left and transactions from the suspended block will go back to mempool. -
What is a stale block?
Answer:
It’s the block that is drop off by the protocol due to acceptance of the longer block as generally accepted blockchain after all nodes synchronization. -
How do stale blocks occur?
Answer:
If two miners happen to solve a block at the same time, both miners then propagate their blocks to the respective nodes in the network, it happen that the blockchain will not be the same, let’s say having A and B split, then another miner by chance choose the hash from say B to start mining ,then the protocol will choose B the longest block with the most difficulty in mining and suspend A sending all unconfirmed transactions back to mempool. -
Why is it important to wait for more than one block to be confirmed when sending or receiving a transaction?
Answer:
It’s important because just a block time of only one confirmation is not enough to determine the occurrence of a still block or orphan block, it’s a fair deal when its 6 confirmation within 10minutes.
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When this happens at the same time you may temporarily have two blocks chaining off in different directions.
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A stale block represents a block that was solved/confirmed, but was ultimately dropped off the chain.
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This occurs when you have two blocks that have been solved at the same time creating chains in different directions. The miner who solves the next block will need to choose which chain to follow and when that happens the other block will get dropped off and have its’ transactions sent back to the mempool.
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It is important to wait for multiple confirmations for the the reason stated above. It is entirely possible for you to have a solved/confirmed block, but have it later dropped off due to no longer being a part of the longest chain.
6 confirmation is approximately one hours, one confirmation means one block is added to the block that contains your transaction and 6 confirmation means there are 6 blocks added to the block that contains your transaction. Best case senior is to wait for 6 confirmation.
- Two versions of the blockchain will momentarily exist until one of them is adopted.
- It is a block that is dropped due to two blockchains existing at once and one of them winning.
- Two versions exist and when one wins the other one must drop the block or blocks that it has which the longer chain does not have.
- Because you can find yourself in a stale block.
- One block has to win and so the smaller block will get dropped.
- The block the gets dropped and does now last.
- When a chain splits into to different blocks going at same time then only one gets picked.
- To make sure the block doesn’t get dropped to create a safer network.
What happens in the bitcoin network when two miners solve a block at the same time?
When two miners solve the block at the same time, they each begin to propagate their own blocks to the network, creating two different versions of the blockchain.
What is a stale block?
A stale block is a block that had been dropped by the network. This is a previously accepted block that then later becomes invalid. This can also be referred to as an Orphaned block.
How do stale blocks occur?
Stale blocks occur when a new miner chooses which version of the blockchain they wish to append their new block to, usually the blockchain with the most proof of work. When this happens the transactions that have been previously accepted into the blocks on the other existing blockchain are returned to the mempool.
Why is it important to wait for more than one block to be confirmed when sending or receiving a transaction?
To ensure that the current blockchain will be the trusted version and to minimise the possibility of the block being dropped.
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Miners compete with each other to solve a cryptographic puzzle, called a nonce. In order to append a block to the blockchain they need to solve this cryptographic puzzle. In order to do this, their hash of their block needs to be below a certain threshold; that threshold is called a target and it is inversely proportional to the current difficulty level for miners. When the target is high the difficulty is low and inversely when the target is low the difficulty is high.
In the situation when two miners produce a block at exactly the same time and are propagating their blocks through the network, there are then 2 versions of truth, both valid, propagating through the network.
Since transactions in blocks do not have to be identical (some miners may have chosen tnxs that others have not and visa versa), it is possible that two miners could both have hashed nonces that have a low enough target to be valid. However, since the network accepts the longest blockchain, the blockchain with the most proof-of-work (the blockchain that has expended the most hashing power, the most energy and thus the most work) will win. It’s not about the number of blocks mined but the difficulty of the blocks and how much energy (or hash power) was expended in order to mine it. -
A stale block is a block that was valid and was able to solve the nonce, but lost out when another valid block (that was also able to solve the nonce) was able to append another block and thus won out b/c the network accepts the longest blockchain that has expended the most hashing power.
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Stale blocks occur when a competing block, by chance, wins out by expending more hash power and appending another block past the first block thus making their chain longer than the now stale block. This stale block will then be put back into the mempool.
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It is important to wait for more than 1 confirmation (ideally 6) because short of 2 confirmations there still could be a possibility of your confirmed transactions being invalidated (made stale) and sent back to the mempool. The 10 minute block rule takes care of this b/c within in 10 minutes all nodes around the world will have had enough time to validate enough blocks to make an invalidation impossible.
- when it happen like this the reward will be divided in those two
- the stale block is not confirmed yet so it need to confirm
- its important because i we don’t wait there will be a serious problem in the network because maybe the last block mine first and first block is the origin block so the second block which has been mined will be contain wrong information
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There will be 2 valid blocks that are most recent, resulting in a divergence that will need to be corrected as the chain moves forward.
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A stale block is a valid block that was mined but got dropped from the blockchain, returning all its transactions to the mempool.
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Stale blocks occur when one branch gets confirmed at a faster pace than the other branch because the nodes recognize the chain with the longest proof of work.
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You want to be sure your block doesn’t get orphaned.
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What happens in the bitcoin network when two miners solve a block at the same time?
The blockchain network will have 2 branches of valid blocks competing. At some point they’ll have a longer blockchain and the shortest will be discarded.
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What is a stale block?
It’s a valid block that was already inserted to the blockchain but later discarded in favour of a longer branch.
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How do stale blocks occur?
Explained on question 1.
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Why is it important to wait for more than one block to be confirmed when sending or receiving a transaction?
To make sure your transaction will be propagated to a lot of nodes and will be in a long branch. This will increase the chance the transaction will be persisted definitely on the blockchain
Homework on Stale Blocks – Questions
1. What happens in the bitcoin network when two miners solve a block at the same time?
Two chains of equal length (i.e number of blocks in their chain) are simultaneously created.
2. What is a stale block?
A stale block is a block that gets thrown back into the mempool because it no longer belongs to the longest chain in existence within a blockchain network.
3. How do stale blocks occur?
Stale blocks are generated as soon as one or more of the chains that resulted from blocks being added to a blockchain simultaneously (thus creating two or more chains of equal length but will different end blocks) become shorter than the new longest existing chain (resulting from a block being added more quickly to it).
As soon as a chain becomes smaller than the longest available, any additional blocks beyond the point of juncture become stale blocks and are tossed back into the mempool to be validated again by miners.
4. Why is it important to wait for more than one block to be confirmed when sending or receiving a transaction?
To make sure that we’re operating on the right blockchain and not another version where the last blocks might become stale and be discarded back into the mempool (should the case occur).
- What happens in the bitcoin network when two miners solve a block at the same time?
Their block are both valid until another block is completed and added to one of the two. This then invalidates the shorter blockchain and the TX from that block are again added to the mempool. - What is a stale block?
It is a dropped block on the shortest blockchain. - How do stale blocks occur?
They occur when there is a fork in the blockchain when two blocks are completed at the exact same time. Once one of the block chains becomes longer the forked shorter chain block is dropped. - Why is it important to wait for more than one block to be confirmed when sending or receiving a transaction?
This is to ensure that a stale block hasn’t happened and that the transactions have not been dropped from the chain.
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This would fork the cain, and miners will have to choose one chain to continue mining, and the longest one (in computation power, not blocks) will prevail, and the other one will be dropped.
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Is a block that once was confirmed in the chain, but that chain was dropped, so the transactions in the block return to the mempool.
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After a fork and prior drop, the blocks in the dropped chain are called stales or orphaned.
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By waiting a few blocks we can ensure that the chain will prevail and no forks will happen making the transactions unconfirmed.
1.Both blocks are valid and will start to be propagated. However the next block that uses the previous hash of that block will form the longest chain and be upended, which means the other valid block will be disregarded as a stale block and all transactions will return to the mempool.
2.A stale block is a valid block that is eventually disregarded when subsequent blocks do not reference its hash.
3.When miners get the nonce correct and below the target at the same time
4.To deal with the fact that two miners can solve the puzzle and get blocks upended at the same time so there are two versions of truth until the blockchain carries on and choses a path. So a full block of tx’s might be disregarded and returned to the mempool.
- The longest blockchain (most difficult to solve) stays and the other block will be dropped.
- stale block are blocks which have been part of the blockchain at one stage but have been dropped and replaced by a longer chain. This blocks will go back to the mempool to be mined again.
3.They occur when two miners solve a block at the same time.
4.to make sure the transaction is confirmed and not being rejected on a stale block.
-The chain splits
-Once the Blockchain splits the network will choose the block with the longer chain attached to it. Recognizing that block as the final version of the chain
-When two miners mine a block in a common period of time
-Your transaction could be called fully confirmed until more blocks are attached to it.
- its called multiple versions of the truth and the miner must choose the longest blockchain and the other blocks will be dropped.
- A stale block are dropped blocks that were propagated in the Blockchain at one time.
- blocks being propagated to the blockchain at the same time. It is typical to have a waiting period of 6 block confirmations to come after in case of becoming stale.
- To minimize stale blocks from occurring.
1, 2,3 At first both blocks get propagated through the network at the same time, now miners will start to work on both blocks as they always work on the block that they have received in the first place. If one miner finds a legit solution to one of the distributed versions and propagates the therefor longest new chain the alternative version (s) will be dropped and become(s) a so called stale block.
4. If the transaction that you have made was included in a block that becomes a scale block or gets dropped, your transaction goes back into the Mempool, to make sure your transaction is confirmed and stays confirmed you have to wait for 6 blocks to be added to the blockchain to be absolutely sure that your transaction is secured and was not and will not be send back to the Mempool.
- Two version of the blockchain exist, each accepted by a set of nodes / miners. At some point however one of the two blocks will become longer than the other and will be accepted as the true blockchain.
- Stale blocks are block not accepted into the chain due to another series of block with more proof of work being accepted.
- When two blocks are created within short timespan of eachother, so that they don’t have enough time to propagate through the entire network.
- Because that one block can become a stale block, thus reversing the transactions within it. By waiting for more blocks to be build upon a block you increase the certainty that the block won’t be dropped.
1: Even if two miners solve the same block at the exact same time, one of them is going to win eventually, which will be added to the longest blockchain., The shortest one will be dropped from the network, or “orphaned.”
2: A stale block, or an “orphaned block,” is on the shortest blockchain, as another blockchain as been accepted by the nodes participating as the living blockchain.
3: Stale blocks occur when there are two versions of the same data, but is not selected because another block is selected to be on the longest chain.
4: By having at least 6 confirmations, this ensures the block containing the transactions is not dropped from the blockchain.