It has been a bit of a mission (I initially “moved fast and broke things”), but I’ve finally managed to organise and cleanup for public release the work I did on stale block acquisition from chains that merge mine with Bitcoin as I outlined in my post above.
It’s now on Github under merge-mining-research.
As the repo name and contents is indicative of, I realised that stale blocks is just one aspect of merge mining on Bitcoin, so I broadened the scope to be the foundation for research into merge mining on Bitcoin generally, and have outlined additional research directions and analysis that myself or others can pursue, although the initial focus is indeed on stale (and canonical) Bitcoin block recovery/assignment.
I have some additional analysis regarding mining pool ID and analysis that I will be contributing next, and will continue to seek to fill the remaining data gaps in the interest of having a merge mining resource that is as complete as possible for future research.
There’s many GB of the original source data from these chains that I still need to work out how to preserve for the historical record, e.g. chain data from chains that have single live peers, or hosted blockchain data .zip files or similar that could go offline at any notice. Anyway, I will retain this data indefinitely until I can figure this out (suggestions welcome).
As I mention in the README, and should come as no surprise in this day and age, AI/LLMs were indispensable in helping with the discovery, extraction, organisation etc of all of this. But any errors or oversights reside with me.