Topic: Eligius pool is back under the new name Ocean - page 4. (Read 2424 times)

Interesting remarks.

Would it require a hard fork to disallow empty blocks? I'm surprised this is being allowed.

BTC already has a limited capacity (7 tx/sec), so there's no reason to waste blocks (no matter the pool).

Security can be strengthened with full blocks too, even if it takes a bit more time to mine them.

It risks forking the blockchain, and it did happen in the past, it really depends on what stage of the process was the nonce found


1- I receive a block notification from pool x via the P2P network or some relay network
2- I construct an empty block template using only the prev-block hash and start sending work to miners
3- I verify every transaction in that block
4- I exclude those from my mempool
5- construct a new block template with transactions and send work to miners

If a pool hits a block anywhere before point 3, then that's a huge risk because you are now possibly building on the wrong chain since the block you building on could have 1 bad transaction in it, the next thing you do is send your block hash to another pool and the network end up with a parallel chain that is invalid, I think the last thing something like that happened a few pools went ahead with 6 blocks or so and they were all invalidated later, pools who completely verified every transaction in that block rejected it and went on building on the correct chain.

If you mine an empty block post the 3rd point  -- that's fine at least based on my opinion, but you must AT LEAST verify that you are building on a valid block.



I won't even argue that they did it for the rewards since the risks are greater than the reward as far as the entire blockchain is concerned, but it doesn't mean an empty block doesn't add to the security of the blockchain, it does, if block no 100 is an empty block, it adds 1 confirmation to every transaction in all the previous blocks before it, it makes double-spending a transaction in the last blocks more costly and less likely, it also doesn't affect the chances of any other pool hitting another block right after that empty block.

I would do the exact same thing if I owned that pool, I know you would do the same "don't lie I can see you  ", but what I won't do is pretend that I did it for the security of BTC and not my own profit.

But guys, you forgot a very serious issue to discuss here, have you checked the coinbase transaction for that block? lol, I mean given the nature of empty blocks, it sure didn't payout to anybody but the default coinbase address which belongs to Ocean, but on their main page they advertise their pool as


The empty block was found on Jan 1, 2024, 10:32 PM UTC, the funds stayed in their custody until  Jan 2, 2024, 4:21 PMUTC , or 103 blocks post that, it's true that 100 of them must be there given the fact that those are newly mined coins, but according to their sales b.s, every time they hit a block the rewards would go directly to miner's addresses, i.e, paid out in the coinbase transaction and the 100 blocks cool down duration would be at nobody's custody.

Thanks for the link, gotta love his hypocrisy/flip-flopping! Pretty typical for socialists...

If you take it like that, yeah it's a found block that on it's own it does so.
Does Ocean's empty rushed block add more to the blockchains security than a full block mined 3 seconds later by Foundry? No! (let's keep it simple and not go there;)
What I was trying to say if that if Ocean wound's have existed, there would have been a full blocks mined 1-20 god know how minutes later with no diminishing capacity to the blockchain. So his block is not a net gain how he was trying to post it, it's a gain in security just how any other block would have been but a serious decrease in capacity.

The fact is that in this case Ocean didn't think about security of the chain, it though about profits, simple, just as everyone else, there was nothing magically different that Ocean did, he just behave like every pool with $ on it's mind!


Well, alani123, this thing does make a bit of sense, since socialist will always care about somebody's else money than their own, and to me it seems you care far more on those virtual miners that would magically gains something moving to Ocean than real economics.
Which brings us back to the questions you refused to answer
- do you actually have any kind of proof, hard proof (!) it's more profitable to mine on Ocean?
- do you actually mine there and since you have moved there have your profits increased?

If the answers are as I already know the song of crickets, don't you think that before trying to convince us to move you should be the leading example?

Mining is a business
Unicorns farts about an utopia nobody wants while doing business is bankruptcy /end

ps:
vs:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/here-we-go-again-antpool-mined-empy-block-5475893

How times change!

Such an oxymoron... pools are by definition centralized entities, since they reduce decentralization. You don't even have self-custody of the coins until you get paid.

Says the guy who wants the state to restrict Airbnb, instead of letting the market manufacture more buildings (I told you that only Bitcoin has artificial scarcity, buildings can be abundant).

You never responded to my arguments, so don't act "offended" or that you're a "victim", because you're not and you know it.

If you want state intervention, then yes, you're a leftist.

If you believe that Marxism is still relevant, you're also a useful idiot.

Dear internet stranger, it's very easy for me to prove you wrong.

All I have to do is post a photo of my chock-full library (mostly politics/economics/psychology books) and then you'll shut up.

Are you willing to take a bet (1 BTC)? Put your money where your mouth is, I don't like cheap words, nor cowards hiding behind screens.

Let's get a few things straight:
You admit to not mining empty blocks here:

It gets pointed out that by sheer chance sometimes block are mined right after a new block was found and this essentially forces the pool that found it to mine an empty block in order to avoid throwing away ALL of the rewards of their block.

With this knowledge you later admitted that not only does kano not mine empty blocks, but also it does it deliberately. But why would a pool be so willing to throw away perfectly good block rewards?

Uh uh. While I can commend the altruistic reasoning behind deliberately throwing away hash power and potential minned blocks, one must recognize some irony here.
Completely missing on the entirety of a block (i.e. not mining it at all) is definitely worse for the interests of a miner.
Your just admitted your pool has a high chance of doing that because of altruistic reasons.

Meanwhile though you seem to have made it your mission recently to discredit Ocean, failing to ignore its many mertis, in spite of it being arguably the most decentralized pool and the most small-miner friendly pool.
How sure are we than that you're in it for what's good for bitcoin?
If it dawned on you that doing self-promotion at someone else's expense is at best a bit out of place, at worse highly unethical, you perhaps would have restricted yourself in just commenting about the technicals (which I'm sure you have the knowledge to). But instead every second sentence we hear "my pool".
Well good luck defending yourself now that it was discovered that Kano arguably does something much worse to its miners for purely ideological reasons.

I ONCE told you that while some of your ideas make sense, your conclusions on politics and current affairs are outlandish.
I then compared this to the fact that even Marx having been born 200 years ago thus having far fewer access to information and analytical tools than we do, came to better conclusions than you on several matters.

In YOUR mind, me recognizing that you've said things provably dumber than someone born over 2 centuries ago means I admitted that I'm a leftist.
Probably though that only proves that you're allergic to literature and maybe reading as a whole. Not only did what I said fly directly over your head, but you're showing prejudice towards me just because I made a mere passing mention of a historical figure.
Perhaps though, if you had read ANYTHING in the form of a book you would have understood that personal insults don't make up for a good argument.

Ocean ignores a host variety of transactions, as it appeared out with whirlpool and other non-standard according to Knots transactions. If I was a miner, I'd absolutely not want to mine in such a pool, even if there was a zero fee. The total ignored transaction fees are simply outweighing any potential fee reduction.

I don't understand why there is such a fuss around empty blocks. When a pool receives a new block, it must reconstruct the candidate block, calculate the merkle root and send the block header to their miners. This takes some time. Between that time frame, it'd be better to work on an empty block than have thousands of ASICs sitting idle.

alani123 is a leftist, he doesn't understand free market economics...

Seriously, if you don't understand bitcoin, don't bother making up garbage to promote a pool.

Block propagation vs knowing about blocks, does not take a few seconds - that's rubbish.

My pool also does transaction verification in less than 100ms.

What you are talking about is when you know a block exists vs when you know the block is valid.
FACT: Mining on an unverified block header is bad for bitcoin.
PROOF: Antpoo and Fupoo went off on a bad fork for 6 blocks because of this, a number of years ago.

The difference between knowing a block exists, and verifying the block, so you can produce valid work, is less than 100ms for my pool.
So you are talking an extra block of mining time in every 6000 (or more) blocks.
So that's a gain of 0.0167% for the loss of 16% in fees on that one block - yeah the math clearly shows that all these pools, mining empty blocks, are idiots.

But alas this is to be expected where most, if not all pools, don't even undeestand the maths and statistics involved in bitcoin mining.

It's possible that Kano pool doesn't mine empty blocks solely because with such low hashrate the chances would be very slim for them to mine any.

Or perhaps the hashrate they have as part of the network isn't considered significant to do something with hash power between block propagation. So if the latter is true, it would mean that by choise Kano is opting to miss out on ALL potential block rewards if such circumstances arise. Not just those coming from Ordinals.

Some napkin math says that if block propagation takes a few seconds and new blocks are found arojndy every 10 minutes perhaps by that standard there would be a ~1% chance to miss the entirety of a block's rewards mining in a pool that doesn't properly handle hashrate during these seconds.

It's a fact, kano's pool does not mine empty blocks.

As a pool operator I'm sure you know better than me that under these circumstances the options were to either throw a perfectly good block away, or to mine it empty because the previous one hadn't managed to propagate to all miners at such a short time period.

Pretty much every pool* out there will point their hash to an empty block while they're waiting for the new one to fully propagate. Not doing that would mean wasting hashpower for a bit more of a handful of seconds every time there's a new block.

If you can explain in technical terms a feasible method pools can utilize to avoid wasting hash without mining empty blocks, please, by all means... Stop arguing with me and go publish some code that will improve bitcoin and act as a quality of life improvement to all of the protocol's users.
OR if you have such good skills to be able to implement something like this yourself... I don't know. Maybe pitch it to investors and make your pool grow with some healthy injections of VC funds. Mining is quite big on institutional investment these days, OCEAN got started with a big investment too.

* Worth noting that FOUNDRY USA doesn't appear to be pushing any empty blocks with their label on them. But it's unlikely that they're throwing all this hash power away being the biggest pool so there's probably something else at play here.

Vague comments about random possibilities of other pools stupidly ignoring transactions (like you do) mean nothing.

Fact: ocean produced an empty block, wasted possible transaction space, and threw away the available block fees.
How is ocean going to make up that lost BTC they threw away? They wont. It's by design that they throw away BTC.

On my PPLNS pool, we never ignore transactions, we have never produced an empty block over the past 9.3 years, 2435 blocks, and our last block yesterday, we had over 1BTC in fees on top of the 6.25 BTC reward, and on top of all that my pool only charges a tiny 0.5% fee.

How sure can you be about that though?
Have you measured how much the same work would pay in OCEAN and how much it would pay under other share models?
For all I know even if a pool doesn't accept payments for "accelerating" transactions (which take space away from other transactions without guaranteeing payment to miners), most other share models heavily favor the handful of largest miners in a pool at the detriment of any smaller miner that might not be as "professional" end up earning much less.

block timestamps are not to be trusted 100%, but ya, it probably happened in no more than 5 seconds or so.


Public transport, could take a while.


He is actually right, empty blocks do contribute to the overall strength of the blockchain, and does make a lot of money, here is a simple math I did years ago arguing with Kano


Of course, it no more 1.5k a day for those large pools, but the "good sum of money" theory holds stronger than ever today lol, but anyway, not to forget that doing so risks forking the blockchain, if you mine empty blocks then you likely don't verify the transactions, you are blindly building on a block of which you did not fully verify.

But I gotta be fair to Luke, he was always fine with empty blocks, he was very vocal against Jeff Garzik when Jeff proposed to change the protocol to disallow empty blocks.

Reminds me of "go woke, go broke".

Won't last for too long in Capitalism...

Except they threw away more than 1BTC in fees - so they are clearly NOT making more than other pools ...

I'm not sure but this maybe the first empty block of 2024
 Congrats I guess  

Edit: They mined the 2nd empty block of 2024...

Censoring cannot last for too long, it's not the first time it happens in the BTC network:

https://ir.mara.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1239/marathon-digital-holdings-becomes-the-first-north-american

vs

https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/bitcoin-mining-company-marathon-will-stop-censoring-transactions-start-signaling-for

https://twitter.com/LukeDashjr/status/1741967158282686683