Quote from: Mikestang on May 21, 2015, 04:06:39 PM

I appreciate the answers, but the "increases security" reason seems like nonsense to me. The purpose of the block is not to provide security, it is to record transactions.

No. That isn't right. Even an empty block helps people out. If nothing else, the empty block makes the coinbase transaction from 120 blocks previous become spendable. In practice, the empty block brings all those 5-confirmation transactions up to 6 confirmations (and 2-confirmation transactions up to 3 confirmations, etc.) The presence of the empty block makes transactions confirm faster than they would have if the empty block weren't there.

A full block is better than an empty block. But an empty block is better than nothing. (And a block at the same height and roughly the same time as someone else's partially propagated block, which temporarily splits the network into two chains of equal height, is significantly worse than nothing.)

Ideally, transaction fees probably wouldn't go solely to the block in which they were located, but would go to that block and future blocks which build upon them (maybe in a declining way like 50% to the first block, 25% to the second block, 13% to the third block....I don't know as I haven't fully thought about it). Right now it doesn't particularly matter, as the transaction fees are small compared to the block reward. But in the future when there are no block rewards at all, just transaction fees, there might be problems due to this (if someone puts an especially large fee on a transaction, there might be an incentive for miners to "steal" that transaction fee by orphaning the block which includes it instead of building upon the block which includes it). Fortunately there are many years before this will become an issue.

Quote from: Mikestang on May 21, 2015, 04:06:39 PM

Yes, the empty block is followed by a block of transactions, but I still contend that the empty block is worthless to the network.

In addition to the direct benefits of faster confirmations and faster spending of generated coins, think about how the inclusion or non-inclusion of the empty block affects someone who is performing so-called "selfish mining" or some other sort of block delaying attack.