Quote from: Syke on December 12, 2014, 06:28:55 PM

Quote from: jonnybravo0311 on December 11, 2014, 07:11:44 PM

Honestly I don't even understand why a no transaction block should be allowed in the first place. It has no purpose on the block chain since it isn't recording any transactions.

Prohibiting empty blocks is worse than pointless. If empty blocks were prohibited, fake transactions would be created and permanently bloat the blockchain to get around the limitation.

Each block, empty or not, increases the security of every previous transaction. Sounds like a good thing to me, don't you think?

I hear you, and certainly recognize how the addition of blocks onto the chain increases the security of the previous transactions. All I meant by my statement was that from the standpoint of the blockchain it didn't make sense to record a blank because at its core, the blockchain is a record of transactions. I also recognize that since there needs to be a way to bring coins into circulation, we need to have blocks constantly added to the chain to generate the coins. If we truly want to keep the blockchain bloat free, prohibiting blocks empty of transactions as well as those containing "fake" transactions would prove useful. However, I have no idea how you'd determine whether or not a transaction was "fake", or if such a thing is even a possibility. Kano made a great point describing how pools are guilty of making bad decisions such as handing out empty blocks, for which a miner certainly could generate a successful solution.

Anyway, I think we've completely gone off topic here in this thread and should probably move it somewhere more appropriate if we're going to continue. I can definitely understand the points both you and kano made and agree with you that the addition of empty blocks to the chain is a necessary evil in the current state of things.