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The peer-height gate replaced a tip-age check that was wrong in both
directions. It is a strict improvement and it is still blind in the one
case that matters most.
When the node goes deaf -- peers still in vNodes, nothing arriving -- no
peer announces anything, GetPeerMedianHeight() returns -1, and the
fallback mines our best chain. That fallback is right for a node that has
not been told yet and wrong for a node that has stopped being able to
hear, and a height nobody sent cannot tell those apart. A wedged node is
exactly a node with no peer height information, so the gate was silent
for the whole of heights 3966-4085: 120 blocks, 5890.50 BTF voided.
Time can tell them apart. GetPeerHeightAgeSecs() measures how long since
any peer reported a height, counting from first use rather than the epoch
so a starting node does not refuse jobs before its first handshake. Past
20 minutes the pool stops issuing jobs and says so unconditionally in the
log. /poolmineblind overrides it: without an escape hatch a genuinely
isolated pool that is 90% of the hashrate could never restart its own
chain, which is the deadlock the tip-age check used to cause.
Also stop nStartingHeight from going stale. It was a snapshot taken once
during the version handshake and never touched again, so on a long-lived
connection the median is built from heights the peers had hours ago, and
the behind-the-network check drifts toward 'everyone is behind us' and
quietly stops firing. A peer that hands us a block is demonstrably at
least at that block's height.
(cherry picked from commit 0800c18faf703b4acde1b131d0b742d37a86d92b)
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