Ok, say I control a mining pool in the future with a substantial amount of the overall hash rate. 5% or more, for the sake of the conversation. While the pool is compiling and sending the transactions for a block full of transactions, one of the miners in my pool gets lucky and finds a valid hash for an empty block, and the block subsidy is now negligible amount of a few hundred sats.
I now have a decision to make. I can go ahead and send that block out and start mining the next block with all the transactions I was going to include in the current block and a bit of a head start on my competition, because they don't even know a block has been found yet, or I can discard the empty block for which I already have a valid hash, and try to find a hash for that block with the transactions included.
It's not like I have MORE chance of finding a block with the transactions included in either scenario. My chances should still be proportional to my share of the total hashrate. BUT, I will have a few seconds head start vs my competition if I immediately start looking for the next block and submit the empty block that I already have a valid hash for, even though the sats I would receive from it are negligible.
So, I still think the practice will be to submit the empty block to the network, regardless of the small size of the reward. Not submitting it doesn't make the pool any more likely to find a block with the transactions included, and submitting it actually gives a very slight advantage, unless I am entirely wrong about how that works.
Dikaios1517
npub1ku…v3lhe
2024-01-02 04:49:00
in reply to nevent1q…r7w7
Author Public Key
npub1kun5628raxpm7usdkj62z2337hr77f3ryrg9cf0vjpyf4jvk9r9smv3lhePublished at
2024-01-02 04:49:00Event JSON
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"content": "Ok, say I control a mining pool in the future with a substantial amount of the overall hash rate. 5% or more, for the sake of the conversation. While the pool is compiling and sending the transactions for a block full of transactions, one of the miners in my pool gets lucky and finds a valid hash for an empty block, and the block subsidy is now negligible amount of a few hundred sats.\n\nI now have a decision to make. I can go ahead and send that block out and start mining the next block with all the transactions I was going to include in the current block and a bit of a head start on my competition, because they don't even know a block has been found yet, or I can discard the empty block for which I already have a valid hash, and try to find a hash for that block with the transactions included.\n\nIt's not like I have MORE chance of finding a block with the transactions included in either scenario. My chances should still be proportional to my share of the total hashrate. BUT, I will have a few seconds head start vs my competition if I immediately start looking for the next block and submit the empty block that I already have a valid hash for, even though the sats I would receive from it are negligible.\n\nSo, I still think the practice will be to submit the empty block to the network, regardless of the small size of the reward. Not submitting it doesn't make the pool any more likely to find a block with the transactions included, and submitting it actually gives a very slight advantage, unless I am entirely wrong about how that works.",
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