Bitcoin Institute

Satoshi to Nicholas Bohm: some not-accepted blocks are "normal and harmless" (April 6, 2009)

Satoshi Nakamoto April 6, 2009 01:54 UTC

What rate of not-accepted did you see? I didn’t see anything unusual on my end. If you had more than, say, 4 in a row, that would be abnormal and probably a loss of network communication. If it’s scattered and less than 25%, just random bad luck. It’s normal and harmless to randomly get some per cent of not-accepted, and of course randomness can sometimes bunch up and look like a pattern.

The idea of an option to View/Hide unaccepted blocks is a good one, as well as View/Hide all generated blocks so you can more easily see incoming transactions. Seeing the unaccepted blocks is just annoying and frustrating. Everyone faces the same rate of unaccepted, it’s just a part of the process. It would probably be best to default to hide unaccepted blocks, so as not to show giving and taking away something that never was, and not show new generated blocks at all until they have at least one confirmation. It would only mean finding out you have a generated block 15 minutes later than normal, and then you still have 119 blocks to go before it matures anyway. This is on the to-do list for v0.1.6.

Satoshi

Quote from: Nicholas Bohm on April 03, 2009, 11:39:00 AM UTC

I’m having an unusual run of failures, and thought I’d let you know in case this was of any significance.

Regards,

Nicholas

Original external source

https://eth.loan/pdfs/20090406-Re_Generated%20(not%20accepted)-194684.pdf
From exhibit NB1 to Nicholas Bohm's witness statement in COPA v Wright: his own export of his correspondence with Satoshi from Mozilla Thunderbird, filed in July 2023 and put online by decashed.eth in January 2025. The time is the one shown in Bohm's mail client (UK time), converted to UTC. The postal address and telephone numbers in Bohm's signature are omitted.