They are easy to find here -
https://www.antpool.com/poolStats.htm - just by looking for the ones that are only 25 BTC and no change. a bunch of orphan ones as well. so how do you mine a block with no transactions.
It is not hard to do, you simply do not include them.
It is just plain bad for bitcoin, all around.
The worst part is any benefit of including 0 transactions is miniscule, by not including transactions your found block is smaller which results in hundredths of a second faster block propagation time and perhaps a 0.0001% better chance your block does not get orphaned.
It's selfish and slows down transaction processing for everyone.
As bad as the centralization the discus fish and ghash create is, at least they mine big fat blocks with many transactions...
+1
If Bitcoin survives as it is currently designed, the day will come when transaction fees HAVE to be the large part of the block reward, as the block reward will continue to diminish in size. For those that haven't been around, blocks started out at 50BTC. Now they are at 25BTC, and the time isn't too far off when it'll halve again to 12.5BTC. Any pool that purposes puts out blocks without transaction fees is hurting Bitcoin.
The same goes for any pool that grants all transaction fees to the block winner. That can't continue.
M
A ton of pools are going to be put out of business when transaction fees become the main source of revenue for mining blocks. Many others are going to have to rewrite their code to distribute those fees out to miners in addition to the block rewards.
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.
They have to be allowed, of course, in case there were no new transactions between two blocks and the first of the two blocks included all available transactions.
This will rarely if ever happen, but it certainly cannot be disallowed.
One issue is that some pools base their code on the eloipool code, and that code is well known for how bad it is for the bitcoin network.
Eligius gives all users an empty block on a block change to speed up getting work to the miners, that is their excuse anyway - we find it is certainly not necessary with the ckpool code.
Also a while back, due to the problems with the eloipool code getting too many orphans, Eligius restricted all blocks to at most 32 transactions for about 5 months.
It's basically pools making decisions that are bad for bitcoin, rather than coding their pool better.
I've no idea what code Antpool is based on (the non p2pool version) but I do wonder ...