<p>It doesn't mean anything for the average Ripple user. In January of 2013, a bug in the Ripple server caused ledger headers to be lost. All data from all running Ripple servers was collected, but it was insufficient to construct the ledgers. The raw transactions still survive, mixed with other transactions and with no information about which transaction went in which ledger.</p>

<p>Without the ledger headers, there's no easy way to reconstruct the ledgers. You need to know the hash of ledger N-1 to build ledger N, which complicates things.</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2018-02-07T14:52:15.723Z
So, there was only a single centralized copy of each ledger prior to 32570?
Hannah Vernon
CC BY-SA 3.0
2018-02-10T20:21:39.773Z
No, there were several copies, but they were all on machines with identical hardware and software. They all ran out of disk space at about the same time. After this incident, we added protections against exactly this scenario. We deemed a ledger reset too disruptive to be worth doing.
David Schwartz
CC BY-SA 3.0
2013-10-03T04:51:40.913Z
2013-10-03T04:51:40.913Z
David Schwartz
<p>The documentation for Ripple says that the genesis ledger starts at 0 but the "effective genesis ledger" is at 32570, because some historical ledgers are "unavailable."</p>

<p>Why is this, and what does it mean for the average Ripple user?</p>

<ripple><ripple-ledger>
Why is Ripple's effective genesis ledger at 32570?
Manish
# Why is Ripple's effective genesis ledger at 32570?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2013-10-03)

The documentation for Ripple says that the genesis ledger starts at 0 but the "effective genesis ledger" is at 32570, because some historical ledgers are "unavailable."

Why is this, and what does it mean for the average Ripple user?

**Tags:** ripple, ripple-ledger


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## 1 answers

### Answer by username_1 on 2013-10-03. Score: 6 | Accepted answer

It doesn't mean anything for the average Ripple user. In January of 2013, a bug in the Ripple server caused ledger headers to be lost. All data from all running Ripple servers was collected, but it was insufficient to construct the ledgers. The raw transactions still survive, mixed with other transactions and with no information about which transaction went in which ledger.

Without the ledger headers, there's no easy way to reconstruct the ledgers. You need to know the hash of ledger N-1 to build ledger N, which complicates things.

> **Comments:**
> **username_2**: So, there was only a single centralized copy of each ledger prior to 32570?  
> **username_1**: No, there were several copies, but they were all on machines with identical hardware and software. They all ran out of disk space at about the same time. After this incident, we added protections against exactly this scenario. We deemed a ledger reset too disruptive to be worth doing.  

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