Marathon Digital Holdings (MARA), a publicly traded crypto mining company, recently mined an invalid Bitcoin block, as reported by developers, miners, and researchers. The problematic block was at height 809478, and an anonymous Bitcoin developer known as “0xB10C” pointed out a “transaction ordering issue” within MaraPool, Marathon’s mining pool.
Casa CTO Jameson Lopp corroborated this by analyzing data from his nine nodes, confirming that the block contained a transaction that spent an output before it was created, rendering the block invalid. Other Bitcoin node operators also rejected this invalid block.
BitMEX Research explained that the problem arose due to incorrect transaction ordering in relation to a spending output transaction, violating consensus rules. In the Bitcoin network, when a miner produces an invalid block, nodes reject it, and miners have a strong incentive to create valid blocks to avoid wasting resources and potential rewards.
Marathon Digital, with over 37,000 active miners and a hash rate of 3.2 EH/s, operates a substantial mining operation. However, this incident highlights that even major mining pools can make errors that lead to wasted mining efforts.
Overall, this event showcases the robustness of Bitcoin’s decentralized proof-of-work consensus mechanism. It underscores the importance of adhering to network rules and properly structuring blocks, as any deviations can result in rejection by the peer-to-peer network.
By FCCT Editorial Team
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