Why the same confirmed transaction in the Testnet has different block hash and other fields?

1

Igor Barinov

Posted 2015-05-25T18:07:23.550

Reputation: 456

Odd. Chain explorer doesn't seem to have any record of block 891a17... at all.Nick ODell 2015-05-25T18:58:05.030

Possibly they are on two different forks?Nate Eldredge 2015-05-25T20:11:32.667

I submitted to only one using blockcypher.com APIIgor Barinov 2015-05-25T20:18:45.237

May be Blockcypher submitted to two forks same transaction?Igor Barinov 2015-05-25T20:23:34.920

Answers

1

That's pretty common. What happens is that the chain forks for whatever reason and some miners are on each side of the fork. They will both have your transaction in their transaction pool and so eventually include it in a block. So your transaction ends up on each fork.

Ultimately it doesn't matter though as the network will eventually agree on which fork is correct.

Note that recently, testnet has been pretty unmanageable, with regular difficulty resets creating situations where 100s of blocks get created per minute. This creates a lot of chain forks and some can be really long, like in your case. Also due to the high number of forks, some nodes may not have learned about a given block/fork at all if it ended up "losing".

On the mainnet, forks are somewhat infrequent (couple daily) and much shorter (very rarerly more than a block).

Matthieu

Posted 2015-05-25T18:07:23.550

Reputation: 866