According to Jameson Lopp, the event occurred because of an error in the block-building template. The miner who created the block lost his money, since the block was orphaned.

It was reported that a Bitcoin miner tried to add a block to the blockchain, which exceeded by 0.77 BTC the maximum Bitcoin issuance limit of 12.5 bitcoins BTC) every 10 minutes. However, he did not succeed, as a consequence of full Bitcoin nodes that rejected the block for not complying with the necessary features.

The Developer of Bitcoin Jameson Lopp explained that the miner tried to add a block in which the block template did not erase the amount of the commissions from the previous block. Consequently, he was going to receive an extra amount of 0.77 BTC, since the block was found some seconds after the previous block.

Lopp believes that there might have been an error in the block template generator, which could not erase the commissions from the previous template where the block was created. He posted on his twitter account that Bitcoin is an impenetrable fortress of validation and any requests intended to inflate the monetary supply faster than in the established agreement would be denied.

Similarly, Developer Luke Dashjr highlighted that this attempt to alter the reward for creating a block perceived by the miners of the network raises the importance of having more and more users joining Bitcoin. He argued that these elements allow maintaining the security of the blockchain and the operation of the protocol, ensuring that only valid transaction blocks can be added to the chain.

The Spanish developer identified as jochemin, who did not want to reveal his real name, provided some information aimed at helping understand the event better. The developer stated that a miner had created a block that did not respect the rules of consensus, which specify that a Coinbase transaction can never be higher than the number of new bitcoins issued (12.5 BTC) plus the commissions of the transactions included in the block. In this case, transactions were not included; thus, the maximum amount of Coinbase could be 12.5 BTC.

He said that he agrees with Lopp on the argument that this block was unintentionally created. He considers that they simply built the tx Coinbase with the commissions of the transactions that were not included in the block for some reason. In this case, the miner lost money because the block created was not propagated.

He emphasized that propagating a block that does not comply with the consensus is the same as throwing money away, since complete nodes always certify that the rules are fulfilled.

Jochemin noted that the design of the protocol indicates that a miner can never include a block that does not comply with those rules regardless the amount of hash that it uses. The nodes rejected the block and it was orphaned, that is, it was not added to the Bitcoin blockchain, so the event only became an expensive experience for the miner.

By Willmen Blanco

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