
Bitcoin is broken - hatmer
Bitcoin Block #544000 contains exactly one transaction. This transaction is the coinbase transaction, whose only purpose is to give newly minted bitcoins to the miner. The mining pool receives 12.5 bitcoins while providing no value at all to the bitcoin users or the bitcoin network. Mining pools are in fact incentivized to <i>not</i> include any transactions in the block since hashing the merkle root wastes computational cycles. Scaled across a large mining pool, removing these extra cycles removes a non-trivial overhead.<p>This flaw in the design of Bitcoin (and probably most other public blockchains) will disappear once the block reward reaches zero since the transaction fees are also part of the reward for miners. Unless this is fixed soon we expect the whole network to basically stop functioning once every rational mining pool stops including transactions in the blocks.
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wmf
This issue has been discussed extensively and AFAIK no good solutions have
appeared. (There are a bunch of "proof of mempool" type proposals that sound
good but have a bunch of gotchas.)

 _Scaled across a large mining pool, removing these extra cycles removes a
non-trivial overhead._

This isn't really true; the cost of building a non-empty block is a rounding
error compared to the cost of doing the mining because the mining is exactly
the same regardless of the contents of the block.

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maxwell
[https://blockchain.com/btc/block/0000000000000000000b4842f41...](https://blockchain.com/btc/block/0000000000000000000b4842f41ab2f65826a45102def71e43b1d8233a28d9f6)

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emilengler
It is ethical not correct to do things that BTC.com do. But you should also
keep in mind that BTC.com are Bcash promoters. Maybe they want to destroy
Bitcoin because they want to make Bcash stronger. People should stop mining
for BTC.com

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jraedisch
Isn't this already priced into the transaction costs, so that destructive
pools (those mining empty blocks) are at a slight disadvantage over the lon
run?

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ismaelbej
If all mining pools stop including transactions then the whole blockchain will
be worthless, and miner do not want that. It is a kind of delicate
equilibrium.

