Author: Peter Todd 2015-07-04 03:30:16
Published on: 2015-07-04T03:30:16+00:00
On July 4, 2015, Gregory Maxwell responded to a post by Raystonn regarding the violation of BIP66 by a larger hashrate and the accidental rejection of the network. Maxwell explained that a near majority of the hashrate on the network was SPV mining. This means that while blocks propagate throughout the network, miners can get the header of the block before they get and fully validate the block itself. Miners are running custom patches that mine on top of the longest chain they know about, even if they haven't actually verified the blocks in it due to propagation delays. Any miner creating an invalid block for any reason would have triggered this issue with the software miners are running right now. The extra % of revenue makes a big difference when taking into account the low profit margins of mining these days.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T02:05:48.927573+00:00