PSA: What to do if your difficulty < 0.05 and/or net weight < 300,000 (i.e. if you’re on a fork) [Windows]

So we’ve recently hit the 1144000 block milestone to implement the changes in wallet versions 3.7.0.0 and above. This means anyone who has not updated their wallets to a version that is at least 3.7.0.0 will be left behind on a fork. A fork occurs when your wallet deviates from the mainstream block chain and is detectable by the fact that the difficulty and net weight reported by your wallet will drop very low, maybe roughly 0.05 difficulty and a couple hundred thousand weight, depending on how many other people are with you on that fork. Some people may find their wallets have forked anyway despite being a 3.7.0.0 or later wallet, like mine did.

So this is just a short guide to show you what to do if you find yourself on a fork. The first thing you should do, if you haven’t already, is to update your wallet to the latest version. To update your wallet, download the appropriate installer from the gridcoin website here and run it. Once you’ve updated your wallet, now we can start to resolve the fork. Now unfortunately I’m only experienced with Windows, so I’m afraid this guide isn’t going to help much if you’re on a Mac, Linux or Android device.

What you'll want to do is open the Gricoin Wallet's console and type "getblockhash [a block number]", maybe start with something like "getblockhash 1144700", and see if the block hash matches with this website's block hash. All you have to do is type "1144700" into that website's search bar and it'll bring up that block's hash. If yours doesn't match, keep reducing the number (i.e. try 1144600) until you find a block hash that matches. Then type "reorganize [the block hash that matches]". Then your wallet will start replaying the block chain to try and find the correct series of hashes to re-join the main chain. If you find yourself on another fork after reorganize, then try it again at least a couple of times. If you find you’re still on a fork after multiple reorganize attempts, then you’ll need to download a block chain snapshot.

The latest snapshot can be found here, and it’s pretty big at 1.1GB. So you’ll need to give it a while to download. Once the snapshot has downloaded you’ll want to decompress it, close your wallet and head to %appdata%\GridcoinResearch; you can put that in the directory bar of windows explorer and it should work. Then you’ll want to back up your “walletbackups”, “gridcoinresearch.conf” and “wallet.dat” files by making a copy of them somewhere else. Then delete everything in the “GridcoinResearch” folder except for those three folders/files I just mentioned. Then put the files you extracted from the snapshot into the “GridcoinResearch” folder. These should be the “chainstate”, “database”, “txleveldb” folders and the “blk0001.dat” file.

Once you’ve done all of that, you can re-open your wallet, and hopefully it should back in sync quickly. If you’ve got any questions, feel free to leave them below.