The previous found block was lost and the reason is unknown

gnode
Archived posts: 49
Joined: Nov 27, 2016

The previous found block was lost and the reason is unknown

by gnode · · Post #4593

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?
Chris Sokolowski avatar
Chris Sokolowski
Site Admin
Archived posts: 945
Joined: Aug 27, 2014

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

by Chris Sokolowski · · Post #4616

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.
Steve Sokolowski avatar
Steve Sokolowski
Archived posts: 4559
Joined: Aug 27, 2014

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

by Steve Sokolowski · · Post #4626

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.