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> I'm not sure how those freshly minted coins get to MtGox in the first place (any such transfer would presumably be delayed). Assuming they do have freshly minted coins in their pools, That would be consistent of some short term delays. I have experienced delays that fit this model where a Hash for the transaction has been provided but the transfer does not arrive at the other end for a few hours. Anything affected by this mechanism shouldn't be delayed beyond 17ish hours.

Both p2pool and eligius.st allow coinbase payouts to any address, and for arbitrary amounts. It's entirely possible for a person to set their mining address to their deposit one, and suddenly Mt Gox has unspendable coinbase transactions in their wallet pool. People frequently assume as you did that no spends would occur of coinbase transactions, and suddenly end up with broken systems because of it.

Here's one from p2pool, paying to 402 outputs (truncated for brevity).

    "in":[
        {
          "prev_out":{
            "hash":"0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000",
            "n":4294967295
          },
          "coinbase":"03435404062f503253482f"
        }
      ],
      "out":[
        {
          "value":"0.00174533",
          "scriptPubKey":"OP_DUP OP_HASH160 7abdace1a0588adf6bc6673ea11ba2312285f1db OP_EQUALVERIFY OP_CHECKSIG"
        },
        [......]
  ]
http://blockexplorer.com/tx/81e5874360f5c511ae9ad305b9797853...



Why are they unspendable? Do you mean it'd cost more in fees than the value of the output?

edit: oh, you mean they're unspendable for the 100 generations it takes to confirm a coinbase.


Indeed. 120 confirmations are needed to avoid large chains of transaction dependancies being voided during a reorganisation.




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