Accidental hard forks
Jan 14, 2022
The Bitcoin blockchain has seen many accidental hard forks throughout its history. These are more common than one would think and are often resolved so quickly that they are barely noteworthy.
Most accidental hard forks occur whenever two miners find the same block at nearly the same time. As consensus on the network is distributed, both initially see the block as valid and keep mining on different chains before they or another miner adds a subsequent block.
That subsequent block dictates which chain becomes the longer one, meaning that the other is abandoned to maintain consensus. Miners move on to the longest chain since the abandoned one is no longer be profitable for mining Bitcoin on, as they would be mining a fork of the network.
