We are going to do a demo of long-to-validate blocks on Signet on Wednesday. Here are instructions on how you can join.
The goal of this demo is to let end users see for themselves the impact of hard to validate blocks. We have crafted a series of 6 blocks that are hard to validate, but not too much. Each should take between a handful of seconds and one minute to validate, depending on the hardware. @ajtowns is going to mine the six blocks in a row and then reorg them out, so that anyone running a Signet node at the time would see them, but they would not impose a cost to IBD forever.
We are going to do three runs of the demo so everyone has a chance to join live:
2026-04-08T14:00:00Z
2026-04-08T22:00:00Z
2026-04-09T09:00:00Z
How to join the demo live
All you need to join the demo is run a Bitcoin Core node on Signet. You would be able to observe how long it took your own node to validate each block, and compare arrival time with other participants. Feel free to share your results in this thread!
Your Signet node needs to be fully-synced. The historical block chain is still pretty small, you would need about 30GiB of disk space. If necessary, you can also run in -prune mode. It will not affect your ability to participate in the demo.
If you are not able to run a Signet node yourself, you should still be able to observe the blocks as they arrive on mempool.space and the fork dynamics at the temporary peer.observer instance for Signet.
Later i may add detailed instructions here on how to run a Signet node and inspect the logs for various end-user platforms.
Just wanted to suggest vibe coding a basic GUI/display to pull from the logs and display to a user validation times as the blocks come in. I think without an easy visual component there isn’t much to hook many users to directly spin up a signet node and participate with their own node.
I guess this is also a good occasion for testing Bitcoin Core’s latest release candidate. If you are joining the demo and comfortable with running Bitcoin Core already, consider using the binaries from the latest “rc” for 31.0.
Enabling -debug=cmpctblock and -debug=bench logging are good and not very expensive and are required to fill out some of the columns; enabling -debug=net logging as well might also gather some interesting info.
