[Bitcoin-development] Punishing empty blocks?

Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell at gmail.com
Tue May 29 15:33:13 UTC 2012


On Thu, May 24, 2012 at 12:33 PM, Jeff Garzik <jgarzik at exmulti.com> wrote:
> There appears to be some non-trivial mining power devoted to mining
> empty blocks.

In the last 2016 blocks, as I write this, there are only 35 1 txn blocks.

This is about 1.73%, which wouldn't be surprising just from timing
alone.  Moreover, a fair amount (I didn't measure the percentage)
appear to be mined by Eligius— Luke does some clever pre-computation
of the hash tree for faster distribution right after new blocks.

Resources expended on fancy (and potentially risky) techno-economic
hacks to discourage empty blocks would probably be better spent
writing very fast transaction tree generating code.

Can we kill this thread now?




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