The Mandalorian discussion thread

I have a question about carbonite. It seemed like in Empire that it was an improvised solution for locking up Han. It was on the cloud planet mining facility that really had no use for putting people into stasis. They all seemed surprised that it didn't kill him. It seemed clear that carbonite was for some other purpose.

But in the Mandalorian, it seems like it's SOP for bounty hunters. Mando had a book of those things in his hold.

Was it a coincidence that two people happened to figure out carbonite as people-transit at roughly the same general time period or did word just spread to the BH community that it worked after Jabba?

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Carbonite
Looks like it was used on living beings before Vader tried it. I'm guessing it spread among bounty hunters as an easy/cheap way to imprison/incapacitate their targets.