Topic: Empty blocks - page 10. (Read 22955 times)

That's a pretty cool site... didn't know it existed, or I wouldn't have bothered writing my own code to get the results .  At least we both match up (I included the genesis block whereas they didn't).

Weren't 0 transaction blocks dominating the testnet recently because of a pool? Other than that, here are some stats by blockr

https://btc.blockr.io/trivia/block


Edit: 1 transaction in a block essentially means that it's empty.

Not from the data I pulled since the core API doesn't provide it - I ran this against my local node.  I don't know how happy blockchain.info would be if I pummeled them with 86k requests .

I'm sure the earlier blocks had far more empties.  Like I wrote, maybe I'll get ambitious and plot this in a spreadsheet.  I mostly wrote the code for fun just to see how many blocks are empty.

This is where there's plenty of disagreement between pool software writers.  On one side of the fence you've got luke-jr and wizkid who support the empty block theory.  On the other you've got ck/kano who do not support it at all.

Time.  Get the details of the last block mined, immediately start mining for the next - at this point 'empty' - block (and your chance at the block subsidy).  Then while things are busily mining away, build new headers that do include transactions, and at the next opportune moment start mining on that. It's just a small sliver of time, but against an otherwise equal opponent, collecting transactions by default would be a losing strategy in the long run.

Can you tell what pool(s) are currently mining 0 transaction blocks consistently?
Thanks,
Sam

Empty blocks aren't useless as they confirm previous transactions and secure them further against attacks. Though, they are much less useful than normal blocks. I am assuming the 23% number is skewed by 2009 and 2010 blocks which were mosly empty due to not having actual transactions rather than being empty on purpose by miners. 25 out of 1000 last which makes 2.5% seem much more right to work on.
I think miners shouldn't mine empty blocks because they would lose tx fee and make people await more time for their tx to be included in the chain. Why do some pools do that? Is there an advantage?

There's been quite a bit of discussion on this topic throughout the forum.  Some feel empty blocks are valuable.  Others feel they are of no value.

I thought it might be fun to write a small program to see just how many of these blocks exist in the blockchain.  For those who don't know, an empty block is a block that is mined containing only the coinbase transaction that awards the new coins.  To be honest, I was quite frankly surprised by the number there were, especially since people seemed to think they were rare occurrences.  Sure, I expected there to be quite a few at the beginning of the blockchain when BTC was pretty much an unknown and only a select few were mining it.  However, I was not expecting there to be so many empty blocks as there are.

As of block 360189 there are 85295 empty blocks on the chain.  For the math challenged, 23.68% of all blocks are empty.  8 of the last 189 blocks are empty.  25 of the last 1000 are empty.

Maybe I'll get ambitious and write the output to a spreadsheet so I can get some good data points out of this to see trends.

Where do you stand on this debate?

EDIT: I've uploaded the data from my last run.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/2rt64pt6hyhr41b/btc_stats.zip?dl=0.  Has blocks up to 364144

Archive contains two files:

empty_blocks.csv has the raw data in the following format:

Block Height, NumTx, BlockTime (UTC), BlockSize (Bytes), WhoMined (if I could figure it out, BTC address of coinbase transaction if I couldn't, or unknown if no BTC address could be deciphered from coinbase transaction).

stats.csv has data on pools, how many blocks they've mined, how many were empty and percentage of empty to total.

Enjoy.