Quote from: Mixles on July 05, 2015, 09:17:20 AM

Quote from: Peter R on July 05, 2015, 09:07:50 AM

Thanks Mixles! Do you have any thoughts on why F2Pool and AntPool are mining so many empty blocks if the previous block can be validated so quickly?

They gain a 600ms advantage on the verification, then another few seconds on the download, depending on their bandwidth. 600 seconds average in a block, so if they manage to get an advantage of 10 seconds, that's 10/600 or 2% greater profitability than other miners. There will be less incentive for that when the reward halvings happen (fees double relative to subsidy). *shrug* Maybe they are also making some political point, or simply can't be bothered dealing with the txns. But the recent orphans should have cost them a bit. They are playing their own sort of game theories, and not always winning.

I'm not sure I'm following. Based on the ratio of empty blocks to non-empty blocks, it looks like the mean time to process a block is 16 sec and 35 sec for F2Pool and AntPool, respectively. Are you suggesting they're "faking it"?