According to a Twitter post by BitMEX Research, the world's leading cryptocurrency Bitcoin (BTC) has experienced a rare two-block chain split.
Although this event is expressed by many anti-Bitcoin as "a situation that is bad for the reliability of Bitcoin", this is not actually the case.
Bitcoin (BTC) Facing Two-Block Chain Split
Bitcoin chain splits are events where the blockchain, the digital ledger that records all Bitcoin transactions, is temporarily split into two separate chains due to the simultaneous mining of new blocks.
Bitcoin appears to have had a chainsplit of length 2 a few hours agohttps://t.co/TNeDdVbLWw
— BitMEX Research (@BitMEXResearch) May 7, 2023
These splits usually dissolve as soon as one chain becomes longer and heavier, making the other chain stale and leading to its eventual abandonment by the network.
While these chain splits are not entirely uncommon, a two-block chain split is extremely rare for Bitcoin. The last time such an event occurred was in November 2020.
However, given the recent increase in legacy blocks, the on-chain split was not entirely unexpected.
Legacy blocks are blocks that were previously considered valid but are no longer part of the longest chain due to the reorganization of the blockchain.
In this particular case, multiple blocks of height 788686 were produced. As new blocks are mined and reference one of those blocks as their parents, the heaviest chain survives and other blocks become stale.
Some explorers will forget about stale blocks as the timestamp reported in a block may not always be correct due to Bitcoin's Block Timestamp Protection Rules.
Despite the rarity of two blockchain splits, the cryptocurrency community is largely unsettled.
*Not investment advice.
