Quote from: prophetx on July 06, 2014, 01:28:47 AM

Now that bitcoin gets a fair amount of use, why isn't their any logic built in to qualify each block not only with a nonce but with a minimum # of transactions?

for example check this out, it happened to be mined 1 minute after the previous block

https://blockchain.info/block-index/448193/00000000000000003108adad355650e57f214587c287cc5b0e9bb6da482b3b77

I know this would encourage different behavior like miners keeping some reserve transactions but there must be enough no mining fee tx floating around to meet that need

The failsafe I guess you could say is the fact that miners benefit from including transactions in a block as that means they get paid the fee (Assuming there is one). So fortunately there shouldn't be a situation where miners are deliberately mining transactionless blocks. Occasionally it happens by pure chance but that's just the random nature of block generation.

Of course I suppose you could argue that a miner might mine transactionless blocks in order to cut down on the block size for faster propagation, but that'd seem pretty counter productive.