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Bitcoin is broken
Bitcoin Block #544000 contains exactly one transaction. This transaction is the coinbase transaction, whose only purpose is to give newly minted bitcoins to the miner. The mining pool receives 12.5 bitcoins while providing no value at all to the bitcoin users or the bitcoin network. Mining pools are in fact incentivized to not include any transactions in the block since hashing the merkle root wastes computational cycles. Scaled across a large mining pool, removing these extra cycles removes a non-trivial overhead.
This flaw in the design of Bitcoin (and probably most other public blockchains) will disappear once the block reward reaches zero since the transaction fees are also part of the reward for miners. Unless this is fixed soon we expect the whole network to basically stop functioning once every rational mining pool stops including transactions in the blocks.
- emilengler 8y agoIt is ethical not correct to do things that BTC.com do. But you should also keep in mind that BTC.com are Bcash promoters. Maybe they want to destroy Bitcoin because they want to make Bcash stronger. People should stop mining for BTC.com
- maxwell 8y agohttps://blockchain.com/btc/block/0000000000000000000b4842f41ab2f65826a45102def71e43b1d8233a28d9f6 https://blockchain.com/btc/block/0000000000000000000b4842f41...
- wmf 8y agoThis issue has been discussed extensively and AFAIK no good solutions have appeared. (There are a bunch of "proof of mempool" type proposals that sound good but have a bunch of gotchas.) Scaled across a large mining pool, removing these extra cycles removes a non-trivial overhead. This isn't really true; the cost of building a non-empty block is a rounding error compared to the cost of doing the mining because the mining is exactly the same regardless of the contents of the block.
- ismaelbej 8y agoIf all mining pools stop including transactions then the whole blockchain will be worthless, and miner do not want that. It is a kind of delicate equilibrium.
- jraedisch 8y agoIsn't this already priced into the transaction costs, so that destructive pools (those mining empty blocks) are at a slight disadvantage over the lon run?