Bitcoin mining company Marathon Digital has confirmed that it mined an invalid Bitcoin (btc) block during an “experiment” aimed at optimizing the company's operations.
In a September 27 post, Marathon saying It uses a small percentage of the company's hashrate for these experiments and emphasized that they were not trying to disrupt the network in any way:
“In no way was this experiment an attempt to disrupt Bitcoin Core in any way.” Marathon said, emphasizing that they fixed the bug as soon as they noticed the invalid block.
We can confirm that Marathon mined an invalid block. We use a small portion of our hash rate to experiment with our development group and investigate potential methods to optimize our operations. The error was the result of an unexpected error that came from one of our...
- Marathon Digital Holdings (NASDAQ: MARA) (@MarathonDH) September 27, 2023
Marathon said the bug, which arose from the company's internal development environment, was not related to Marathon's Bitcoin production group or Bitcoin Core – the leading software used to connect to the Bitcoin network and run a node.
The incident occurred on September 26 at 9:42 pm UTC in block 809478, according to mempool.space.
Various Bitcoin developers, together with BitMEX Research attributed the invalid block to a "transaction ordering problem". Bitcoin Developer "Mononaut" believe The marathon error occurred when resorting to transactions in ascending order of absolute fees.
This is what the invalid MARA block at 809478 looks like:
- pink transactions no longer exist on the main chain
- blue transactions are invalid due to the order (they spend a result of a transaction included later in the block) https://t.co/SJI1azOB5Z pic.twitter.com/5gY9TRA2eG- mononaut (@mononautical) September 27, 2023
Bitcoin analyst Dylan LeClair He suggested that Marathon should have run this experiment on a testnet before trying it on the Bitcoin mainnet.
On reflection, Marathon said that Bitcoin “worked exactly as designed” by excluding invalid block:
"This incident, although unintentional, underscores the strong security of the Bitcoin network, which rejected and rectified the anomaly."
Related: Marathon Digital's Second Quarter Results Miss Revenue and Earnings Forecasts
Cointelegraph reached out to Marathon for comment but did not receive an immediate response.
The Marathon (MARA) share price fell 2.91% to $8.01 during opening hours on September 27. according to Google Finance.
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