Marathon Digital mines invalid block due to bug

Even the largest min­ers and min­ing pools can occa­sion­al­ly make mis­takes, as evi­denced by Marathon Digital’s error ear­ly Wednes­day morning.

The pub­licly trad­ed com­pa­ny mined an invalid block. This means that Marathon sub­mit­ted a block — which is made up of 2,000 trans­ac­tions on aver­age — that the rest of the net­work reject­ed because it didn’t align with com­mon protocol. 

If the oth­er nodes on the net­work detect an invalid trans­ac­tion with­in the block, they can come togeth­er to reject using the con­sen­sus mech­a­nism built into Bitcoin. 

Jame­son Lopp, a bit­coin engi­neer and chief tech­nol­o­gy offi­cer and co-founder of Casa, told Block­works that Marathon min­ing an incor­rect block doesn’t present a prob­lem for the net­work. It’s more just a mat­ter of for­feit­ed profit. 

“It’s not a prob­lem for the net­work, it’s only a prob­lem for the mon­ey because [Marathon] gave up over $100k in rev­enue,” Lopp said. 

The issue with block 809478 was first flagged by X user @0xB10C, but Bit­Mex Research pin­point­ed the error: Marathon mis­placed two trans­ac­tions with­in said block. This mis­or­der­ing led to the block’s rejec­tion by oth­er net­work participants.