Topic: Eligius pool is back under the new name Ocean - page 5. (Read 3050 times)

Pools hitting zero fee blocks due to censoring tx's are going to face class action lawsuit possibilities maybe not now maybe not after 2024 ½ ing but by 2028 the  1.5625 block hit reward will often be lower than the fees. So deliberately reducing fees to hit a block quickly (antpool trick) more so than a censorship trick like Ocean is doing is going to face a lawsuit.

Yeah I know it is off in the future but it will happen. Maybe Ocean won't for doing it to ordinals but he needs to be wary.

It is not very rare, it is more like impossible, mempool has not been empty for years, not for a single moment.

Please point what is not right about it.

But that is not why they mined an empty block, it is not like they had no other transactions to include, nor the censorship of ordinals makes block template handling slower, their Knots nodes could be slower than core, but i wouldn't imagine a huge difference.



In his tweet he talks about a fee seconds, about 6 seconds difference between receiving the block and propagating his own, so ya certainly longer than Kano's.

Humorous analogy but not right.
Mining empty blocks has *always* been allowed for 1 main reason: to maintain the 10min avg time between blocks for the (now) rare occasions that the mempool is empty meaning there are literally no transactions to process for too long of a time. In the very early days that was almost common, but these days is VERY rare but still does happen.

Speaking of mempool...
If you checkout https://mempool.space/ you will see *all* of the upcoming tx's in the que and what the expected composition of the block should be based on its profitability (fees paid). Note that while there is no one global mempool: every node on the network maintains its own mempool, so different nodes may hold different transactions in their mempools, ALL pools can also see that information and at least in the case of Kanopool have already selected what tx's they will use and have that data cached for use when a new block-found msg is broadcast to the network. The 1st cached data includes (or should include) the id of the previous block found to propagate the chain. It's how Ocean pre-scans ((or should be pre-scanning) the tx's that they will use in the change of work sent when they see a new block.

Difference is Ocean chooses to not include any tx's related to ordinals whereas Kanopool and all the others accept all of them so scheduling the tx's is easy

@alani123, you said and use that as a reason to mine an empty block. Kano has repeatedly said here that the time for his pool to generate and broadcast new work to all the miners is under 100ms + time needed for the data packets to reach the miners (ping time). I'd think that for most other pools it should be about the same.

Um, for whatever reason(s) Luke's original Eligius pool software was exceeding slow at processing new work and because of that yes even back then he was doing empty blocks. As he has always been censoring tx's (back then casinos) methinks that possibly Ocean has the same issues for the same reason(s)?

Well, if all nodes decide they would reject empty blocks, that would take care of it without a fork, however, this would achieve nothing, say I own a pool and I want to deliberately mine empty blocks, I would simply include only my own made up transactions and wala! my blocks are no longer empty and you will have to accept them.


Honestly speaking, I wouldn't call this a "waste of blocks." This could turn into a chicken-egg debate. But if you think about it, empty blocks do not have an impact on the chances or speed of your transaction getting confirmed as long as they are not excluded intentionally. Your transaction will always be mined in the next block that includes transactions.

We need to make sure that everybody understands that it was not possible for Ocean to pause that block, include transactions, and then transact it. That block was found empty, and it can't be changed. If Ocean would not propagate or even find that block, none of the pending transactions would have been confirmed anyway. It would only lead to Ocean losing a whole block for nothing good "except avoiding the risk of building on an invalid blockchain." But again, we don't know if they did validate the previous block's transactions or not—it's something we can't know. They can't prove, and thus it's always possible to accuse them of not validating, and they would have no way to prove you wrong.

I really feel like the above needs a lot more explanation for the average person to understand how empty blocks are not a waste of transaction space. Since many of you here know I like to use some weird analogies, let me use the same bus analogy to try and explain the empty block situation.

Imagine a bus station where people are lining up waiting to be picked up (transactions in mempool). The normal behavior would be many buses waiting at the bus station with their doors open and the crowd of people are lining up (not knowing which bus is going to let them in). None of these buses are allowed to drive unless a pink bird falls on their front glass. When the bird falls, the bus driver or his assistant already know what people they are going to bring in because they sat there long enough to see who has a valid ticket and how much each of them is willing to pay for the seat.

So when the bus drives away, the other buses would now need to see which people took off on that bus so that they can exclude their names from the calling list, or else the next checkpoint would stop the bus and kill the bus driver because his list contains a person's name that isn't on the bus (mining pools clearing their mempool and removing the transactions that were already included in the previous block).

So as long as the time intervals between pink birds falling on a random bus's front glass are long enough, the bus driver will always have the time to entrain those people, and it's all working fine because on average it takes 10 mins for a pink bird to fall, which is enough time for the old bus driver to handle his passenger list. But sometimes, a pink bird would fall into one of the buses right after another pink bird had fallen. So the bus driver doesn't even know which passengers the previous bus took, and he needs to hit the pedal immediately before one of two things happen that would make him lose the ride.

A- Another pink bird falls into another bus (someone else finding a block to propagate it).
B- The pink bird falls on the ground because of gravity (the pool simply didn't propagate the block, threw it away and waited for another block).

The bus driver here would throw away his pen and paper, close his door, and hit the pedal as fast as he can, and the police checkpoint would let him through because he has no list at all (empty blocks are allowed while blocks that contain invalid transactions are not).

Now you can imagine that your transaction is a person sitting in that bus station. Had the second bus driver chosen not to drive away, it doesn't mean he would be able to take you in because, remember, he needs to prepare his list before the pink bird makes it to his front glass. It's not like he could let you in and he chose not to. He had only two options (drive empty or don't drive at all), which means (mine an empty block or don't mine at all). So to you as a person waiting in the bus station, that bus isn't wasted; it just happened.

Of course, doing so means the second bus is now at risk of reaching that checkpoint only to find that the bus driver before him was shot dead by the police because there is something wrong in his list. He looks in the rearview mirror (right before he is shot dead too) and finds another bus behind him who would also be stopped and killed. Lol, of course, while that isn't the end of the world, it simply means that you contributed to misleading the limited number of buses into taking the wrong route. And now the legit buses are fewer in number, and thus those poor people have to wait even longer because of your greedy behavior, not to mention all the misery you created at the bus station.

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...