Why are some bitcoin blocks empty? Orange Surf from the mempool.space team joins me to explain his recent research report on this topic. We discuss:

Timestamps:

(00:00) - Intro

(00:44) - Orange Surf’s research report on empty blocks

(02:02) - Block interval data sets 

(06:25) - What is an empty block?

(08:09) - What causes an empty block to occur?

(11:35) - Nuances of a working of a miner; switching from empty to full block templates

(14:05) - Differences in the empty block performance

(19:01) - Antpool’s internal miner firmware  

(21:30) - Sponsors

(25:00) - Effective management of block templates by mining pools

(34:54) - Ocean's empty blocks

(36:08) - Mining decentralisation and proxy pools

(41:07) - Sponsors

(42:14) - Mining templates & pool payouts

(44:57) - Upcoming mempool features

(49:06) - Outro

Links:

Sponsors:

Stephan Livera links: