Quote from: eleuthria on November 07, 2015, 05:17:32 AM

Quote from: TracerX on November 07, 2015, 05:07:33 AM

Quote from: p3yot33at3r on November 07, 2015, 02:02:25 AM

Quote from: aarons6 on November 07, 2015, 01:45:37 AM

the bad thing is that this pool is one of the pools that is contributing to the slowness of confirmations by mining empty blocks with bad code..

Precisely. It's a little amusing to see miners who support a pool that doesn't contribute to the network complain about how long transactions take Cheesy

I was having this same conversation with someone on Reddit earlier this week. Pool _choose_ to submit empty block, am I wrong? Bitfury has not posted a single empty block in the last week, while Antpool has posted ... 21 total empty blocks last week. BitFury and Antpool averaged 22 and 28 blocks last week, respectively.

Am I wrong to conclude that the pools have a choice in the matter?

They have a choice. It's extremely unlikely that any time in the last 2 years there has ever been a point where there was not a single valid and non-spam transaction waiting for confirmation even at the exact time a block was solved.

EVERY chinese pool currently is making the choice that is bad for bitcoin. The excuse is that internet connectivity in China to the outside world is shit. The workaround is to not rely on their full bitcoin node to see the newest block on the network, and instead use active listening connections to other sources to see a new block header (not the whole block). If they see a new block header, they'll immediately push out new work using that as the previous block, without doing any validation (because their node hasn't seen the full block yet). The only way to do this is by making a block without any transactions because you don't know what was actually confirmed in the previous block.

Even after it was clearly shown this is a bad idea (see the soft fork earlier this year the chinese pools caused), they have stated they have no intention of stopping this activity. So now the rest of the network has to live with pools that don't do their fucking jobs, causing longer transaction confirmation times, because miners are too stupid to stop mining on pools that are actively hurting the network.

Thank you for your prompt answer! I appreciate someone with your experience chiming in--it appears to me that there is a fair amount of misinformation regarding the subject. I would like to have a full understanding of the issue so that I can help educate others. Could you point me towards the right direction, e.g. documentation of the mechanisms?

Cheers.