Hello all, sorry if this has been answered before but I can't quite find the answer I am looking for. So I am new to running a full node and lately I have been spending time looking at mempool explorer. Watching blocks fill up in real time as they are being mined made me realize that miners are hashing a block that is (potentially) changing every second. Especially when there aren't enough transactions to fill up a block. So does this mean that, say in the case when transactions in the mempool are low, each time a new transaction enters the mempool the miners will stop attempting to hash the old block and start attempting to hash the new block that includes the new transaction? It seems like trying to shoot a moving target would really slow down the process... but I am not a programmer or a developer of any sort
Also I have noticed a handful of really small blocks that get mined especially fast. Is this just a coincidence that my lizard brain makes a connection, or is there some causality there?