Dat's a lot of blocks.  

In case anyone is wondering about the new bits, white squares are blocks, red squares are blocks >990000 bytes, black empty squares are 1-transaction blocks. The green goo now represents average fullness not including 1 transaction blocks, the red line is inclusive of 1 transaction blocks.

Disk is filling up with book data. I moved a bunch off. I need to zip it up really. I have 240G worth not including the stuff I already archived off.

#feelthebearn

I was always skeptical. I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt though (but not my money)

Typical. I walk away from the forum for an hour and it all goes to shit.

The problem with that is that you'll be paying for unused space on the veracrypt partition as well.

You might want to look at Amazon Glacier. In exchange for that it might take a while for you to get your data back, prices are very cheap. $0.007 per GB (I think that's per month)

Always go for local encryption if you value your security too. There's been reports of some file stores not being as secure as you'd think.

Lots of "deleted" there. Brief summary?

We're still doing the empty blocks. I haven't got around to changing it yet.

Small blockers are so edgy and cool. I bet they smoke behind the bike sheds at lunchtime too.

Absolutely. But other miners cannot start mining new blocks with transactions until they have the new block and know which transactions in their mempool are no longer supposed to be there. In the meantime, there is a bunch of hashpower going to waste so they just throw in an empty block which will be valid since it will only contain the coinbase transaction since that is the only transaction that they know will be valid (though they could also generate other transactions that they would know to be valid so detecting this can be worked around).

Ideally, they'll also validate the block they have received as well. Some miners have not in the recent past which has meant they have mined on invalid blocks (which made their block invalid also).

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/38437/what-is-spv-mining-and-how-did-it-inadvertently-cause-the-fork-after-bip66-wa

That was f2pool there too...

As is often the case, it's less about the answer than "What question do I want to ask". The question I want to ask is how much of the available block space is being utilized. Since empty blocks are blocks which be definition cannot be utilized...

Now, if we were only having a few transactions per hour and empty blocks were being mined because there were simply no transactions to mine, that would be a totally different question.

Aside to fatman: I'm not sure that mempool size will be a totally useful number since mine will be different from everybody else and there's no telling where we will be between blocks. It might be worth having as a rough indicator though.

Absolutely correct. Though the default client allows for some zero fee transactions and miners may choose to keep doing so because they feel it's good for Bitcoin at this stage.

Nope. Because the reason for mining empty blocks is that the miner does not, at the time, have enough information to mine a valid block with transactions from the mempool. It's fiendishly clever.

So the miner is mining purely for the block reward because that is all that is available for that short period of time. Which incentive only goes away when the block reward does.

Actually surprisingly little. I'll see if I can do it and work out JJG's size increase. Also, there's a bug which nobody seems to have noticed yet

The issue is that they cause the situation to be represented inaccurately. Say we had a backlog sufficiently large that we could fill a hundred blocks. Each block could legitimately be mined up to close to the full block limit of 1000000. Somewhere around 5-7 blocks mined in an hour's sample should honestly produce an aggregate average block fill of 99/100%.

Now, consider that if 3 empty blocks get thrown out there on top of those 5-7 (empty blocks tend to get mined very quickly since miners will usually start mining in transactions asap), that pulls the percentage down to maybe 70%. The question is, is that a fair representation of the situation?

My inclination is to regard empty blocks as NOOPs and exclude them from the calculation. Though I would probably indicate that empty blocks were found.

It iterates over all blocks since the last check, totals the block space used and the block space available (by adding 1000000 for each block) and calculates the percentage from that.

In theory, empty blocks *could* be valid but in practice, I think it's fair to say that 100% are from early mining empty blocks (which is a valid miner activity according to the rules but skews calculations and causes the difficulty higher than it should be, causing a lower tps availability)

Shill? The desperation is showing.  

I'm going to stop including 1 transaction blocks in the full-block calculations though. There were three out of six (all F2Pool) when I looked yesterday. That's skewing things way down.

Yes. This is really my point. I'm not saying that we should increase it because Satoshi said we should, I'm just saying that it is an arbitrary limit with no meaning and was chosen to be so high that it would not interfere with regular transactions (which will no longer be the case shortly). Something like doubling the limit would have zero effect in the immediate term but will avoid us running head-first into a wall in 3 months or so.

Not fair!

I'm still recovering from new years and now I have to open a bottle of Champagne this soon?