I never understood why empty blocks is allowed... you can start immediately and get a head start over other mining pools. Granted it is just the time to load in transactions from the mempool and hash the result of appending them to the blockchain, but still... if you're in a race, why not take any advantage you can get?
I've monitored the chain for years, and empty blocks are very very common. I know there is a civil war of people that want to make the block size larger vs keep it the same... I think at this point it they would both agree that every block should at least be 90%+ full before it is accepted. That seems like a simple fix.
The attackers would then like just fill up the blocks passing a tiny amount of bitcoin between all their wallets, but at that point they might as well just use the mempool.
In the end, if you have mining dominance, you win. No point denying that. If you want to "ban" miners, or rewrite history, bitcoin is no longer decentralized.
The network needs a blocks every 10 minutes or so in order to mint a coinbase transaction (the tx that generates new Bitcoins). This is important to ensure that the network reaches 21million cap on time. If new blocks are not minted every 10 minutes, the calculation to reach 21million will be distorted.
The network adjusts the difficulty (number of prefixed 0's in the hash) based on estimated mining capacity based on a running average time to complete previous blocks. There is no "on time" to reach the 21 million cap. All those "calculations" that would be "distorted" are those of the hedge fund managers who are holding strictly out of speculation.
There is no way to prove an entity hasn't been mining on the side, capable of mining blocks faster than the main chain, even keeping up with increased difficulty, and any day they could publish their chain to the network, and it would be accepted as it was the longest chain. This would obviously destroy bitcoin, so the only reason to do that would be pure terrorism. Exploiting a 51% attack to double spend would also destroy the trust, so any attacker in it for the money is currently just mining empty blocks and getting rewarded for it, and there is nothing anyone can do to stop them.
Once the 21 millions coins are all in the wild, transaction fees will need to be enough to entice them to keep running... otherwise, they cash out and burn it all down. If they aren't capable of burning it all down, perhaps the number of people validating transactions on the network goes way down... and the difficulty goes way down... until eventually all those old people from the mining days could turn their machines back on one day for a much easier 51% that they are now capable of.
I've monitored the chain for years, and empty blocks are very very common. I know there is a civil war of people that want to make the block size larger vs keep it the same... I think at this point it they would both agree that every block should at least be 90%+ full before it is accepted. That seems like a simple fix.
The attackers would then like just fill up the blocks passing a tiny amount of bitcoin between all their wallets, but at that point they might as well just use the mempool.
In the end, if you have mining dominance, you win. No point denying that. If you want to "ban" miners, or rewrite history, bitcoin is no longer decentralized.
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