Oddbean new post about login | logout What's going on with the #bitcoin chain? A block was mined 11 minutes ago that builds on one mined 6 minutes ago? How does that work? https://image.nostr.build/5fb8713dafb2149adf6629f44cebae87ecfe89ac09979c8410c8a19193cc1977.jpg
@Jameson Lopp
It's valid - I've done far worse when I attacked testnet 😇
"A timestamp is accepted as valid if it is greater than the median timestamp of previous 11 blocks, and less than the network-adjusted time + 2 hours. "Network-adjusted time" is the median of the timestamps returned by all nodes connected to you.
Whenever a node connects to another node, it gets a UTC timestamp from it, and stores its offset from node-local UTC. The network-adjusted time is then the node-local UTC plus the median offset from all connected nodes. Network time is never adjusted more than 70 minutes from local system time, however."
https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/915/why-dont-the-timestamps-in-the-block-chain-always-increase#917 I guess the 6 minute miner had their clock running fast. But it wasn't off by a lot so it didn't trigger any validations.
Since it's an empty block it was probably mined immediately after the one before it.
This explanation only makes sense if antpool let's the individual miners set up the blocks I think. Which I don't know to be true or false.
My understanding is that there's something called a race condition or a fork, but over 50% of network has to reach consensus or the bogus branch will wither and die... ? Too simple an explanation I'm sure but it might be related to what your observing... Apparently your miner could start mining at any block, maybe due to bad time settings? IDK...
That was my initial thought, but the blocks were numbered sequentially. If it were a fork, I'd expect there to be two competing blocks with the same number. Based on the comments and links in the replies, it seems like the most likely explanation is that someone's clock was significantly off.