3. your argument completely misses the point as well as the reality. the answer is that it is exceedingly unlikely that Satoshi perfectly chose the point at which the network in July 2015 would consider 1MB to be "too large" to the pt that pools would start SPV creating hard forks. that is so ridiculous on it's face it's not worth arguing. also, it also totally ignores the fact that the top 5 Chinese pools have already gone on record stating that despite their problems with the GFC, they are perfectly ready and willing to inc the cap to 8MB and double it every 2 yr according to Gavin's proposal. which says they are doing SPV mining for a reason other than the blocks are "large". i can't say for sure b/c afaik, they haven't said exactly why they are SPV'ing. i think it's b/c the cap is being continuously hit resulting in bloating unconf tx sets which is somehow affecting their willingness to include confirmed tx's in blocks.
I'd like to run two statistical hypothesis tests:
1. Is F2Pool/AntPool more likely to produce an empty block when the previous block is large?
2. Is F2Pool/AntPool more likely to produce an empty block when mempool swells?
I think the answer to Q1 will be "yes." But I don't see why the answer to Q2 would be yes for any reason other than the previous block is more likely to be large when mempool swells (i.e., mempool is not the cause, just correlated).
Johnnybravo0311 is compiling a
file that shows:
Height,NumTx,DateTime,WhoMined
for each block in the Blockchain, which will help answering Q1. Does anyone know where I can get comprehensive data on the typical node's mempool size versus time to help answer Q2?