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:

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