Some current turbulence on the Bitcoin network: DB corruption errors on start from Bitcoin-qt / Bitcoind

Please return your seats and fasten your seat-belts.

All Bitcoin-qt / Bitcoind nodes will currently fail to come back up after a restart, reporting

": *** coin database inconsistencies found" and "Do you want to rebuild the block database now?"

Reindexing _will not_ correct the problem. In Bitcoin-qt you should say no to this reindex prompt as it will not help for this problem and will only waste your time.

To workaround:

Please specify the command-line or configuration file argument -checklevel=2 to Bitcoind or Bitcoin-qt.

The issue appears to have been introduced by 0.8.0 and is only a local issue, beyond the annoyance restarting nodes it appears to be harmless and carries no forking risk but will take a software update to fix completely.

This problem will persist until no more than 288 blocks after 256818, unless another trigger transaction is added to the blockchain (which may well happen).

More information will be forthcoming once a patch is available.

On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 1:53 AM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell@gmail•com> wrote:

> More information will be forthcoming once a patch is available.

I now have a patch up for review.

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/2982

(You should wait until other developers have had a chance to review before rushing out and applying it. The checklevel=2 workaround is adequate for now.)

There is a good writeup of how to perform the workaround in Windows at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=290922.msg3117923#msg3117923