Dataset of stale headers and blocks observed on the Bitcoin network.

Ideally, stale-block hashes should be provided along with the corresponding block-header. A hash without a block header could easily be fake.

Stale block data can be queried via the getchaintips RPC of Bitcoin Core. The get-data.py script can be used to directly query the stale-blocks and their headers. It produces CSV output in the same format as the stale-blocks.csv file. Tips that are active or invalid are already filtered.

To automatically add your data to stale-blocks.csv you can use the following:

python3 get-data.py
git diff stale-blocks.csv

Create a commit and open a PR. Keep in mind that this allows to figure out how long you've been running a Bitcoin Core node. If that's a problem, you can also submit your data to the project's maintainer to contribute anonymously.

Where possible, it's favorable to have the full blocks belonging to the stale block headers. You can use the --get-full-blocks argument to get-data.py to store the full blocks as binary blobs in the blocks direcory.

These can be imported back to a Bitcoin Core node with, for example:

cat blocks/813210-000000000000000000021c9f203786c0adcd7ae9a68a25d5e430d2a3dba613d5.bin | xxd -p | tr -d $'\n' | bitcoin-cli -stdin submitblock

To list the headers and block-files missing from the dataset, the following command can be used:

$ get-data.py --show-missing
...
Missing blockfile 845869 00000000000000000000858fe3cb999f449bcbfcadd3bdb240641b6b9c39bb30
Missing blockfile 833411 000000000000000000018450917aeae08339ffd3172807420dd35c736032898f
Missing header 824221 00000000000000000003a0653dbab14cc0f6fef121442b29d6b4005cdcdbc0d5
...