stale-blocks

Dataset of stale headers and blocks observed on the Bitcoin network.

Contributing stale-block headers

Ideally, stale-block hashes should be provided along with the corresponding block-header. A hash without a block header could easily be fake.

Stale block data can be queried via the getchaintips RPC of Bitcoin Core. The get-data.sh script can be used to directly query the stale-blocks and their headers. It produces CSV output in the same format as the stale-blocks.csv file. Tips that are active or invalid are already filtered.

To automatically add your data to stale-blocks.csv you can use the following:

sh get-data.sh > my-stale-blocks.csv
cat stale-blocks.csv my-stale-blocks.csv | sort --reverse --unique --output stale-blocks.csv
rm my-stale-blocks.csv
git diff stale-blocks.csv

Create a commit and open a PR. Keep in mind that this allows to figure out how long you've been running a Bitcoin Core node. If that's a problem, you can also submit your data to the project's maintainer to contribute anonymously.

Contributing full stale blocks

Where possible, it's favorable to have the full blocks belonging to the stale block headers. Similar to the get-data.sh script, the get-full-stale-blocks.sh script can be used to store the full blocks as binary blobs in the blocks direcory.

These can be imported back to a Bitcoin Core node with, for example:

cat blocks/813210-000000000000000000021c9f203786c0adcd7ae9a68a25d5e430d2a3dba613d5.bin | xxd -p | tr -d $'\n' | bitcoin-cli -stdin submitblock