> Do you think that was the reason?

Likely yes, but impossible to know for sure. The block after that was found by Foundry USA. It would seem that they happened to receive the SBI Crypto block first.

But sure, let's investigate a bit:

The MARA block was found at 00:54:09 UTC.
The SBI Crypto block was found at 00:54:32 UTC.

Miners can of course have an inaccurate clock but let's check:

The `ntime` of both SBI Crypto and MARA tends to be very close to UTC:
https://stratum.work/template/SBI%20Crypto
https://stratum.work/template/MARA%20Pool

I used https://www.epochconverter.com/hex to convert the hexadecimal `ntime` to a human readable format.

So it is likely that the times are indeed correct.

Even though the MARA block was found 23 seconds **before** the SBI Crypto block, MARA still lost the block race.

EDIT: On second thought, looking at the block template update intervals: (https://stratum.work/timing) MARA and SBI Crypto both update their block template in ~30 second intervals. A 23 second difference is still within that time frame. So hard to say when exactly these blocks were found.

> Or it was the next block found that determined the outcome?

The next block always determines the outcome.

Filiprogrammer

Since most of the nodes still have their policy set to a minimum fee of 1 sat/vB, propagating a block that includes these extremely cheap transactions tends to be slower than a block that can be immediately reconstructed via Compact Block Relay.

Do you think that was the reason? Or it was the next block found that determined the outcome?

bitcoin

MARA lost block race against SBI Crypto at height 935976

>  Since most of the nodes still have their policy set to a minimum fee of 1 sat/vB, propagating a block that includes these extremely cheap transactions tends to be slower than a block that can be immediately reconstructed via Compact Block Relay.

Do you think that was the reason? Or it was the next block found that determined the outcome?