Also I have noticed a handful of really small blocks that get mined especially fast. Is this just a coincidence that my lizard brain makes a connection, or is there some causality there?
I think this may be a coincidence, as the blocktime isn't necessarily after an empty block
A few months I made a
dashboard with block data . If you click the button "Last Week", you will see that there were 3 empty blocks mined last week:
block id pool blocktime
691877 AntPool 00:01:15
692142 AntPool 00:15:49
692222 ViaBTC 00:07:40
Except for the first one, the other two had a normal blocktime. I think some pools might want to mine empty blocks to try to make fees goes higher, so they will make more money in medium term (this is my guess only, but I think it makes sense)