Topic: Question About Bitcoin Blocks - page 2. (Read 338 times)

No. It makes no difference to the time it takes to mine a block if that block contains zero transactions or 5,000 transactions. The expected average time to the next block is always 10 minutes.

Not quite. It's not like after the last halving that mining suddenly becomes less profitable. The block subsidy will half every 210,000 blocks for the next ~120 years. It's a very gradual process by which the block subsidy contributes less and less to the total block reward and the total fees contribute more and more to the total block reward.

An additional incentive for miners to mine empty blocks may come in the form of them wanting to add confirmations to previous transactions or unlock their block rewards from previous blocks, which cannot be spent until they have 100 confirmations.

Ok! What you said makes a lot of sense. Thank you all for your input

if there are no transactions. then bitcoin is already dead.
if there are transactions then bitcoin is still useful.
once the reward depletes miners are less incentivised to mine PURPOSEFULLY empty blocks just for the reward because there wont be a reward, so they only get paid by adding in transactions.

obviously if there are no users making transactions. and thus no miners wanting to mine for free. the blockchain just halts and stops building on itself.

bitcoin remains useful to users if its affordable to users. it txfee's become stupidly expensive because of limited amount of possible transactions. that will deter usage. and thus shoot miners in the foot.
..
imagine user preference is a max of $2/tx before they move away from using bitcoin.
a block that only holds 2000tx average is only $4k fee total

gentle progression of more transaction count capacity per block ensures that the overall block cost does not have to be met by only 2000 transactions. but progressively 4000tx, 8000 16,000 thus keeping fee's low and keeping bitcoin useful, while combining the fees to award more to miners.. ($8k, $16k, $32k respectively, while individual users still only pay $2 each)

other factors are that there are about 1.5millions asics (distributed within ~20 pools)right now..  where by if transactions become lax we may see many asics drop off EG 1m asics in 13 pools... then 500k asics in 6 pools.
the 'share' of the fee's can be shared between less people meaning each miner gets more of the share
eventually if transactions become so infrequent, it may become only 3 asics running by 3 people who can just about afford to keep mining.
(the difficulty adjusts depending on how many asics are hashing and solving blocks too quick or too slowly)

Ok thank you! I am slowly starting  to understand how this works. So like I have it now, after all the bitcoin is mined, mining will be a lot less profitable because no empty blocks will be created, AND you will only be able to take the fee from a transaction as payment, instead of the minting that you can do now with all blocks.

A very interesting question. Nowadays miners have a clear incentive to mine even an empty block without transactions because they still receive a reward for finding a block. They construct a special transaction called coinbase transaction with which they pay to themselves with block subsidy (currently 6.25 bitcoin) plus transaction fees. If there are no transactions then it means there is no additional reward in the form of transaction fees, but block subsidy still exists. After 2140 there will be no block subsidy anymore, so in the case of the absence of transactions, miners will have no incentive to mine empty blocks. The network will stop for some time or I am missing something.

Here is an explanation of how mining works https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/mastering-bitcoin/9781491902639/ch08.html

Ohh, so if there are transactions they just get verified, but if there are none, empty ones are generated. I assume that if there are transactions to verify mining goes faster, because  you dont have to wait 10 min for a new block?

Mining goes on and creates more blocks every ~10 minutes whether there are transactions to process or not.
How you think it was in the early days of Bitcoin? Just look at the blockchain and you'll see how many empty blocks were mined. And even today, empty blocks are not that rare.

Hi, so I have been doing some research about crypto and I think I am starting to get it XD I only have one main question now:
What will happen if there are no more bitcoin transactions for some reason? Will mining even be possible then?
As I  understand bitcoin mining is essentially verifying transactions, so thats why Im wondering what will happen if there are no transactions to verify.

Thx in advance

(Edit: missed a word :/)