Bitcoin mining company Marathon Digital confirmed that it mined invalid Bitcoin (BTC) blocks during an “experiment” aimed at optimizing the company’s operations.
In a post on September 27, Marathon explain It used a small portion of the company’s computing power to conduct these experiments and emphasized that they were not trying to alter the network in any way:
“This experiment was in no way an attempt to change Bitcoin Core in any way,” Marathon said, stressing that they corrected the error as soon as the invalid block was discovered.
We can confirm that Marathon did mine an invalid block. We utilize a small fraction of the hash rate to experiment with our development pool and investigate potential ways to optimize our operations. This error was caused by an unexpected bug on our…
— Marathon Digital Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: MARA) (@MarathonDH) September 27, 2023
Marathon said the vulnerability originated in the company’s internal development environment and had nothing to do with Marathon’s Bitcoin production pool or Bitcoin Core, the leading software used to connect to the Bitcoin network and run nodes.
The event occurred at 9:42 pm UTC on September 26, block 809478, according to to mempool.space.
Several Bitcoin developers and BitMEX Research Attributed to The invalid block is attributed to the “transaction ordering problem”. Bitcoin developer “mononaut” believe Marathon errors come from placing trades in order of increasing absolute fees.
This is what MARA’s invalid block looks like at 809478:
– Pink transactions no longer exist in the main chain
– Blue transactions are invalid due to ordering (they spend the output of a transaction included later in the block) pic.twitter.com/5gY9TRA2eG— The Lone Ranger (@mononautical) September 27, 2023
Bitcoin Analyst Dylan Leclerc suggestion Marathon should conduct this experiment on a testnet before trying it on the Bitcoin mainnet.
Marathon said that by excluding invalid blocks, Bitcoin “works exactly as designed”:
“This incident, while unintentional, highlights the strong security of the Bitcoin network, which rejected and corrected this anomaly.”
related: Marathon Digital’s second-quarter results missed revenue and profit expectations
Cointelegraph reached out to Marathon for comment but did not receive an immediate response.
During the opening period on September 27, Marathon (MARA) shares fell 2.91% to $8.01. according to Go to Google Finance.
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