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The previous found block was lost and the reason is unknown

Posted: Fri Dec 16, 2016 6:27 pm
by gnode
While solo mining various coins (eg grandcoin) suddenly mining stops and I see this fault "The previous found block was lost and the reason is unknown". Sometimes the coin returns from the fault right away sometimes it is days. My question is what or who determines when the coin is again mineable and returns back to the top tier with no errors?

Re: The previous found block was lost and the reason is unknown

Posted: Fri Dec 16, 2016 6:56 pm
by Steve Sokolowski
Thanks for pointing this out. I'll look into it and get back to you.

Re: The previous found block was lost and the reason is unknown

Posted: Mon Dec 19, 2016 3:50 pm
by gnode
Any insight into this. Some coins stay in error for days with this fault others stay this way for only a few minutes, compare grandcoin to rabbitcoin. Why? What determines this?

Re: The previous found block was lost and the reason is unknown

Posted: Tue Dec 20, 2016 11:01 pm
by Chris Sokolowski
The error could be caused by multiple issues, but they are unique to each coin. Many of these coins have features in their code that were originally destined to avoid forks from blocks bring submitted too frequently and reject blocks if they are too soon after the previous one. Coins like Bunnycoin throw an error and reject blocks if your node is a certain number of blocks ahead of other nodes. We can't possibly write code to handle all these errors, so blocks sometimes get lost and we avoid mining those coins.

Re: The previous found block was lost and the reason is unknown

Posted: Wed Dec 21, 2016 9:14 am
by gnode
I understand why you avoid mining some coins, but why do you pause mining of some coins for long periods of time, specifically grandcoin. Grandcoin occasionally has lost blocks. sometimes after a lost block, mining doesn't resume for days other times minng resumes within a few minutes. What determines how long the mining is paused?

Re: The previous found block was lost and the reason is unknown

Posted: Sat Dec 24, 2016 9:38 am
by Steve Sokolowski
gnode wrote:I understand why you avoid mining some coins, but why do you pause mining of some coins for long periods of time, specifically grandcoin. Grandcoin occasionally has lost blocks. sometimes after a lost block, mining doesn't resume for days other times minng resumes within a few minutes. What determines how long the mining is paused?
Mining is paused until someone else finds a block. For some networks, that doesn't happen for days because we are one of the only people mining the coin.

This error occurs because there are some coins that require special handling of transactions, and it's either not obvious what those are, or we don't have enough time to implement the special case for that coin. An example is some coins that require some blocks to have a "donation" to a specific address - those blocks come up lost when we don't include the donation because we never spent the time to figure out how to include it.

If we continued mining before someone else finds the next block, we would just have the same outcome, which would result in lost revenue to miners.