My experience with mining on the wrong chain, from a masternode operators view.

I have been running MRJA masternodes for a few months now, a altcoin with about 1 to 2 btc of volume a day.. Its been pretty smooth. Until my rewards started increasing quickly.

You would think thats a good thing right? Well I kind of thought that at the time of the chain split, but I did not know about it at the time. And assumed my newly earned coins at an accelerated rate was nice, so for a few days I just let my masternodes run and I continued to get more rewards. Eventually I got skeptical and went onto Ganjacoins Discord server.

The main operator of the Discord server mentioned some people may be on the wrong chain, and they should update their wallets right now. Then it hit me, I was mining on the wrong chain. I checked my wallets block height and was off by a few hundred blocks... Damn it.....

So I updated my wallet and sure enough my earnings for the last 7 days disappeared. Showing in the wallet as generated but not accepted. Frustrated but not completely deterred, I turned my masternodes back on through the wallet. And they would not mine..

About a day later I realized my masternodes were on the wrong chain and I had to get them on the right one. This was not so easy, as there were many incorrect chains going around at the time. I reindexed my chainstate 5 times before it synced to the right chain, by verifying in their block explorer the block height.

Luckily a user on Discord was a huge help in getting on the right chain, this user even built a docker container to make it very easy to spin up a masternode. Though I am concerned how hard it will be to update it through the docker container and such, but ill cross that bridge on the next update.

So a reminder if you are an altcoin miner or masternode operator, keep an eye on your block height and if its off by even a few blocks.. You may be mining on an invalid chain.