Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
Slightly different tone that previously.
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/why-do-some-bitcoin-mining-pools-mine-empty-blocks-1468337739/
Quote
Is it bad?
"The whole point of the Bitcoin network is to process transactions. Therefore, empty blocks are often criticised as bad behaviour as creating very little value for the network by accelerating disinflation and stealing from honest miners.
However, it can also be considered as counter-balancing the centralisation tendency of the network: a pool which wins a block can start mining the next block immediately since they already know which transactions were included in the block. Whereas other miners first have to download the transactions, and then generate a new block which doesnt include any of them. The ability to mine with just the header, could be considered to limit the benefits of centralisation.
Technically, it could be easily prevented by including, for example, a hash of the current coinbase concatenated with all the previous transactions in the block header. The recent fall in the number of empty blocks shows that the issue can be contained through improvements in the protocol which make mining empty blocks less interesting. Additionally, the gradual decrease of the block reward and the increased reliance on transaction fees will likely make mining empty blocks unprofitable over time."
"The whole point of the Bitcoin network is to process transactions. Therefore, empty blocks are often criticised as bad behaviour as creating very little value for the network by accelerating disinflation and stealing from honest miners.
However, it can also be considered as counter-balancing the centralisation tendency of the network: a pool which wins a block can start mining the next block immediately since they already know which transactions were included in the block. Whereas other miners first have to download the transactions, and then generate a new block which doesnt include any of them. The ability to mine with just the header, could be considered to limit the benefits of centralisation.
Technically, it could be easily prevented by including, for example, a hash of the current coinbase concatenated with all the previous transactions in the block header. The recent fall in the number of empty blocks shows that the issue can be contained through improvements in the protocol which make mining empty blocks less interesting. Additionally, the gradual decrease of the block reward and the increased reliance on transaction fees will likely make mining empty blocks unprofitable over time."