bug?

So, I was helping a friend out today (September 19th, the friend being UGotProblems) by mining misplaced blaze spawners at his home base in the wild. I kept dying, obviously, and lost 4-5k at a time. At the end of it all, I went to go get the left over nuggets that fell into his dropper chest...

So i know i'm not using the proper bug report format (although this is in bug reports) but i don't know if this is a bug or not, so i was looking for a stronghold and i found one but, when i found the portal i couldn't use it! So i got TheR3dst0n3rYT to tpa to see if he could use it, but he...