New York News
Public Bitcoin mining firm Marathon Digital mined an invalid Bitcoin block on Wednesday, causing the firm to miss out on newly minted BTC it would have otherwise earned.
Various Bitcoin users and developers including Casa CTO Jameson Lopp identified the invalid block using their own Bitcoin nodes earlier today. Marathon later confirmed that they were in fact responsible.
An invalid block is one that violates Bitcoin’s consensus rules, and is therefore rejected by network nodes. Bitcoin nodes are run by miners, exchanges, and ordinary users alike, who keep their own copy of the blockchain and verify new blocks of transactions as they come in.
A block may be labeled invalid if it includes a double-spend transaction or breaks Bitcoin’s block size limit, among other things. Marathon did not specify how its block was invalid, though some