When two blocks are mined and propagated at similar times times causing a fork, how long would a node store a stale chain until considered orphaned?
How many blocks (work) are needed on chain I for chain H to be discarded?
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Sign up to join this communityBitcoin Core will never discard reorged blocks, until they are pruned (which happens regardless of whether the blocks are in the active chain or not).
Only one chain is considered "active" at a time though. The rules are:
All other chains are considered inactive, but if they get extended, they may end up becoming active again.