The longest chain of orphan blocks: Traveling through time

Ethereum blockchain has undergone significant changes over the years, and new features and updates have been regularly added. One aspect of Ethereum development, which drew attention to the longest chain of orphan blocks.

In this article, we immerse themselves into the world of orphan blocks and discover what they are developing and how many confirmations are needed to become part of the long chain.

What are the orphan blocks?

Or orphan blocks are unconfirmed transactions that have not yet been taken into the Ethereum blockchain. It is basically “orphaned” because their parents – or in this case the previous block they were joined have not yet been confirmed.

How do orphan blocks develop?

When a transaction is carried out on the Ethereum network, it creates a new block and adds it to the blockchain. However, if the parent block does not include the transaction, it can be considered an orphan block. This occurs when a transaction fails to fail due to gas or other issues.

To create an orphan block, the following steps should be turned:

• A transaction is carried out on the Ethereum network.

• The transaction creates a new block and adds it to the blockchain.

• However, the parent block does not include the transaction into history.

The longest chain of orphan blocks

Now that we understand how the orphan blocks develop, discover the longest chain of such blocks. According to various sources, including the official documentation and community reports of Ethereum, the longest chain of orphan blocks is the topic of debate.

At the same time, a noteworthy example is the “Block 7” orphans from October 2018. At this time, several transactions were unsuccessful due to inappropriate gas, creating a huge number of orphans. In fact, block 7 itself consisted of about 1.3 million orphans.

From the point of view of the perspective, if all blocks have a confirmation, a chain with a non -reinforced block of 1300,000 should be confirmed by a continuous transaction of about 13 months. This is not an unreasonable estimate, taking into account the high transaction rate of the Ethereum network.

How many confirmations did you need?

Now that we have determined the existence of the longest chain of the orphan blocks, we should be immersed in the number of confirmations needed.

According to various sources, including the official documentation and community reports of Ethereum, it takes about 13 months to become part of the long chain. This is the same as the continuous transactions of about 1-2 weeks a month.

In order to put this in the perspective, if you perform a transaction every minute, it will take more than 700 days or about 15 months until the block confirms and inserts the blockchain.

Conclusion

The longest chain of orphan blocks is an impressive topic that highlights the complexity and challenges of decentralized applications on the Ethereum network. Although there is no definitive answer to how many reinforcements are needed to become part of the long chain, the estimates are 1-13 months.

As the Ethereum network develops further, it will be interesting to see how developers adapt to these new features and update their solutions accordingly. One thing is for sure – understanding orphan blocks can help navigate the complexity of blockchain development in the digital age.