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:

• Why do empty blocks happen? 

• Comparing empty block rates across mining pools

• Firmware and config differences

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:

• Empty Block Report: https://research.mempool.space/empty-block-report/ 

• Pool Reserve: https://orange.surf/pool-reserves/

• Enterprise: mempool.space/enterprise

• Community Sponsors: mempool.space/sponsor 

Sponsors:

• Swan.com (code LIVERA)

• CoinKite.com (code LIVERA)

• Mempool.space

Stephan Livera links:

• Follow me on X: @stephanlivera

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