I see what happened. All your sockets went dead somehow. You had no
communication with the network, but because you had 8 zombie
connections, it thought it was still online and kept generating blocks.
You can tell this is happening when your blocks are numbered
sequentially, without other people’s blocks interspersed, like:
2/unconfirmed
3/unconfirmed
4/unconfirmed
5/unconfirmed
6 blocks
7 blocks
It’s implausible that you would be the only one to find blocks for 6 blocks in a row like that.
When you exited and restarted, it connected and downloaded 45 blocks that the network found in your absence. Since your blocks were not broadcast to the network immediately, the network went on without them.
It sounds like you had exactly the same problem on Wine. There’s clearly something about socket handling on Linux that’s effecting it either way.
I’ll start researching this. Ultimately if I can’t find the root of the problem, I’ll have to make some kind of mechanism to watch for an absence of messages and disconnect. The only workaround for you right now would be to exit and restart more often.
All but one of your node connections went dead at the same time, one shortly after. IRC was still working, so it wasn’t that you were offline from the internet.
I wonder if the status of blocks should say ”#/unconfirmed” all the way up to maturity (119/unconfirmed then 120 blocks) instead. The meaning of the number isn’t as strong for blocks as for transactions.
I think it would be an improvement not to count one’s own blocks as confirmations. A drawback would be that the status numbers shown by different nodes would not match. The status number would no longer be coordinated with the maturity countdown on blocks either. A lighter option would be a special case only if all confirmations are your own.
Liberty Standard wrote:
I just lost 6 sets of maturing coins! I had 10 sets of bitcoins maturing. The last set was generated at about 0:22. It got to 2/unconfirmed before bitcoin got stuck. At 10:10, the bitcoin which was generated at 0:22 was still only at 2/unconfirmed. Since you had told me that I wasn’t going to lose coins, I shutdown and restarted bitcoin. On the bright side, it shutdown and started up very smoothly. But unfortunately, when the blocks updated, I lost 6 sets of bitcoins. Four sets were still unconfirmed, but two sets were confirmed. And there’s no trace of them now. Perhaps now that you have the ‘Show Generated Coins’ option available, you can put back in failed bitcoin generations. I just don’t like that those bitcoins just disappeared into thin air. I’m still running the Linux build at the moment, but the Wine version is suddenly looking much more attractive now that 6 out of the 10 sets of bitcoins I generated in the past 24 hours just vanished. I’ve included my debug.log.
On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 1:45 AM, Liberty Standard <newlibertystandard@gmail.com mailto:newlibertystandard@gmail.com> wrote:
The Linux build has generated a decent amount of bitcoins within the past 20 hours and I trust what you're telling me about database errors, so all signs point toward me running the Linux build from now on. The only half annoying thing about the Linux build is that my computer's fan has gone from 50% to 100%. :-P I know I can limit the CPU, so if it gets on my nerves too much and if I can live with less bitcoins being generated, perhaps I'll do that. Or maybe I just need to start listening to more music...
…
There's no risk in shutting down while there are unconfirmed. When you make a transaction or new block, it immediately broadcasts it to the network. After that, the increasing #/confirmed number is just monitoring the outcome. There's nothing your node does during that time to promote the acceptance.
Source: Published by Martti Malmi on GitHub in February 2024 as part of his testimony in the COPA v. Wright trial. The full correspondence archive is available at mmalmi.github.io/satoshi/.