Quote from: garlonicon on July 25, 2021, 09:43:57 PM

In such decentralized system, even if someone will receive fees in some private way, that miner will simply receive lower reward, because each miner will receive a fraction of its own coinbase transaction, so the more fees that miner will include, the more coins that miner will get after dividing that coinbase reward.

Given a scenario in which a miner has sufficient hashrate to expect to mine 4 blocks per day, average tx fees of 0.05 per block, and a 3% pool fee to cover things such as orphans, and other expenses:
If a miner receives all the transaction fees in the blocks it finds privately, they will receive:
0.2 BTC in transaction fees privately
25 BTC in block subsidies via the pool
0.2 BTC in transaction fees via the pool
-0.756 BTC in pools fees paid to the pool (to be deducted from the amounts received via the pool)

The pool will receive 25 BTC in block subsidies, but will payout 25.2 BTC to the miner. The extra .2 BTC will ultimately come from the other pool users when the pool lowers the amount it pays per hash.

Quote from: DaveF on July 25, 2021, 11:31:56 PM

Quote from: PrimeNumber7 on July 25, 2021, 09:10:24 AM

The reason why blocks are sometimes empty immediately after a block is found, is because miners are blindly accepting that a previously found block is valid, and is mining on top of said block prior to confirming which transactions have been confirmed. Once miners validate a recently found block, they will update their database so that their new block candidates will reflect only valid transactions.

More or less correct. The biggest thing out there is the amount of bad info being discussed.

Many / most of the larger pools have many many many nodes. They all should be in agreement. However, due to many things there may be a period of time that some are updating / processing / working on the block that was just found / just having a bad day so they do not agree.

So they work on an empty block. Once whatever agreement conditions are met, usually within seconds, they work on blocks normally.

People like to scream that they are SPV mining or some other crap. Or have misconfigured nodes. And yes some are. And some are just being paranoid.

No matter how you slice it, even at the speed of light and ultra fast CPUs & drives & networks there will be a delay.

Because, more or less, mining 1 block a week with NO FEES is better then orphaning 1 block every 2 years because that 1 node was having a bit of a slowdown and missed something.

Now some people will chime in that they can have their node validate in under 2 seconds or some crap like that. Yeah, so can mine. But if I have 20 farms each with 2 nodes that all talk back to 2 or 3 servers that make sure that they all agree that then talk back to all the farms. It's going to take a bit. For a small miner that finds blocks once a month it's one thing. For one that is mining 10 blocks a day it's another.

-Dave

I don't see any reason why a miner would work on an empty block (assuming the mempool is not empty), other than that the miner has recently received a new block and is not yet sure which transactions are valid. Even if a pool has fully validated a block they are now mining on top of, before constructing a block with transactions, they will need to update their list of unspent outputs and compare this to inputs in unconfirmed transactions. So even if a miner is not SPV mining, there will still be a period of time in which they are mining an empty block.

I believe that most pools probably have direct connections to other major pools in which the pools send newly found blocks directly to eachother so they can save seconds in the time it takes for a block to propagate so the pool can start working on a new block earlier. I don't doubt that pools also have multiple other nodes that are not publicly known so to prevent the pool from being the subject of a sybil attack, or not receiving a block because a miner did not send said block via this private network.

The only reason why two nodes would not be in agreement is if one node received a block but another did not. It would not make sense to mine an empty block if you are not mining on top of a newly found block because you have already validated that the previous block was valid.