Empty Block Report - mempool research
This mempool research report aims to thoroughly explore the causes and frequency of empty blocks through Bitcoins history.
mempool research is the newly established home of bitcoin analysis by mempool.space researchers.
- "Why do empty Bitcoin blocks exist? Empty Bitcoin blocks occur when miners find a block using an empty template. Many pools send empty templates to miners because they’re faster to distribute, helping miners start work slightly sooner."
"Frequency of empty blocks: 10.6% of all Bitcoin blocks to date were empty, the majority of which were in the early days when there were very few transactions. Over time this rate has dropped significantly, and now ranges from 0.15% to 0.5% at the network level."
- "Each pool decides whether to send empty templates and follow up with full templates, or only send full templates. Delayed switching to full templates means miners miss out on transaction fees. Only sending full templates causes a slight extra delay."
- "Not all mining pools produce empty blocks. For example, Foundry and Mara produce none. Of those pools that do find empty blocks, Spiderpool and Ocean have much higher empty block rates than average."
- "Currently if miners switch to full templates within ~7 seconds, the empty+full strategy can be slightly more profitable. However, many miners struggle with timely switching Values sensitive to networking conditions and fee proportions, see report)."
"Ocean employees have publicly speculated that antpool released firmware which intentionally causes miners to work on old jobs for over 60 seconds while using different firmware, which lacks this issue, for their own mining. This is not supported by the data, which shows that the percentage of empty blocks found by antpool has actually been increasing following the most recent halving. If antpool were using patched firmware to reduce the time to switch from empty templates, we would expect antpool's empty block rate to be falling, not rising."
- "Recommendations for pools & miners: Pools/Miners with frequent empty blocks and long switching intervals should investigate delays and reduce switching time to maximize revenue."
