I have been looking at mempool because it has an interesting visual of how blocks are being mined and the alike, but looking at this further this has prompted me to ask whether it's possible for miners to manipulate the network to benefit themselves through artificial incentives.
Why do I ask, well if you look at some of these blocks in the photo above, you can see that some blocks have less than 500 transactions when on other days we have 2000 to 3000 transactions being accommodated in each block, so really how does the mining mechanics work because at the moment we have over 50 thousand transactions in 212 blocks pending and to clear this why arent more transactions being accommodated in each block to clear the clog???
My question: Do miners manipulate the network in their favor to get better incentives?
Now a days Bitcoin is a crypto where mining difficulty is so much that if miners shut down their mining machine than they could be in loss and thus they have to run so that they get their investment back nevertheless to make some profit. So I think now a days it do not depends of Bitcoin miners. Let's see what will happen in the future.